When antibiotics first came out, nobody could have imagined we’d have the resistance problem we face today. We didn’t give bacteria credit for being able to change and adapt so fast.
— Bonnie Bassler
Most bacteria aren’t bad. We breathe and eat and ingest gobs of bacteria every single moment of our lives. Our food is covered in bacteria. And you’re breathing in bacteria all the time, and you mostly don’t get sick.
— 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.
— Bonnie Bassler
Bacteria mineralized the rocks; they deposited the iron. They made the geology we see.
— Bonnie Bassler
I think being open-minded about what Nature is trying to tell you is the key to being creative and successful.
— Bonnie Bassler
We mostly don’t get sick. Most often, bacteria are keeping us well.
— Bonnie Bassler
I am lucky because I get to work with the smartest, most creative, and most devoted group of students and postdoctoral fellows imaginable.
— Bonnie Bassler
I called up and said, ‘Dad, I won a MacArthur.’ My father goes: ‘I always thought your sister would win that,’ and I said, ‘Dad, just say congratulations and keep your private thoughts private.’ At that point he laughed, then burst into tears, and it was obvious that he was so happy and proud.
— Bonnie Bassler
What’s great about bacteria is you have a surprise every day waiting for you because they’re so fast, they grow overnight.
— Bonnie Bassler
Everybody, as soon as they do a good experiment, their first thought in this lab is, ‘That can’t be right. I must have screwed it up. What did I do wrong?’ And that’s the best kind of scientist because they’re filled with this self-doubt. And if I’m going to be honest, that’s who I am. And it’s what drives me.
— Bonnie Bassler
Bacteria live in unbelievable mixtures of hundreds or thousands of species. Like on your teeth. There are 600 species of bacteria on your teeth every morning.
— Bonnie Bassler
I remember the day we found the gene for the inter-species signaling molecule like it was yesterday. We got the gene, and we plugged it into a database. And we immediately saw that this gene was in an amazing number of species of bacteria. It was a huge moment of realization.
— Bonnie Bassler
You can find bacteria everywhere. They’re invisible to us. I’ve never seen a bacterium, except under a microscope. They’re so small, we don’t see them, but they are everywhere.
— Bonnie Bassler
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.
— Bonnie Bassler
We’ve all been sick; we’re all afraid of infection. I think the easiest application to help people understand what quorum sensing is and why it’s important to study is to tell them that if we could make the bacteria either deaf or mute, we could create new antibiotics.
— Bonnie Bassler
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.
— Bonnie Bassler
As a kid, I loved doing puzzles, solving riddles, and reading mystery books. I also loved animals and always had pets.
— Bonnie Bassler
Science is difficult and slow no matter who you are. The hours are long, and the glorious ‘aha’ days come only very infrequently. You have to keep believing that if you put in the hours, those days will indeed come!
— Bonnie Bassler
By weight, you are more human than bacteria, because your cells are bigger, but by numbers, it’s not even close.
— Bonnie Bassler
