Bonnie Bassler

I want to make a drug. I want the science to be more than imaginary, where I think, 'We're learning these fundamental principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' I think we are doing that, but I want to do something really practical. I want to actually, in my lifetime, help people. ”

If a bacterium is trying to infect you, it won't secrete alone, because your immune system will block it. Bacteria will hide until they can all act together and make an impact. ”

The goal of scientists is you hope that the thing you're working on is bigger than the thing you're pipetting into that tube at that moment. ”

I went to UC Davis because I wanted to be a vet. It's a great profession if it's right for you, but it's memorizing the bones and the muscles, and I am terrible at stuff like that. Also, there's a lot of blood and gore involved. ”

It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial, single cells. They are individual cells, but they act in communities, exactly the way people do. ”

I was a huge athlete as a kid. I was on every sports team. ”

As a kid, I loved doing puzzles, solving riddles, and reading mystery books. I also loved animals and always had pets. ”

Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or chicken pox. When a virgin population encountered those pathogens, it ravaged the population, and now they're childhood diseases, and eventually they won't even be that. That's our relationship with bacteria, going through time. ”

When antibiotics became industrially produced following World War II, our quality of life and our longevity improved enormously. No one thought bacteria were going to become resistant. ”

Think about multicellularity on this Earth. Every living thing originally came from bacteria. So, who do you think made up the rules for how to perform collective behaviors? It had to be the bacteria. ”