It'll change who you think you are.” - Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk It’ll change the way you think about the world. I Contain Multitudes is science journalism at its best.' - Bill Gates 'Yong just keeps imparting one surprising, fascinating insight after the next. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.

I Contain Multitudes is the story of these extraordinary partnerships, between the familiar creatures of our world and those we never knew existed. We see, as William Blake wrote, the world in a grain of sand. We see how humans are disrupting these partnerships and how scientists are now manipulating them to our advantage. I Contain Multitudes lets us peer into that world for the first time, allowing us to see how ubiquitous and vital microbes are: they sculpt our organs, defend us from disease, break down our food, educate our immune systems, guide our behavior, bombard our genomes with their genes, and grant us incredible abilities. We learn the secret, invisible, and wondrous biology behind the corals that construct mighty reefs, the glowing squid that can help us understand the bacteria in our own guts, the beetles that bring down forests, the disease-fighting mosquitoes engineered in Australia, and the ingredients in breast milk that evolved to nourish a baby’s first microbes. Even today, many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us-the microbiome-are invaluable parts of our lives. Only recently have they immigrated from the neglected fringes of biology to its center. When they finally surfaced in biological studies, they were cast as rogues.

For most of human existence, microbes were hidden, visible only through the illnesses they caused.

I contain multitudes book review