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I never met a microbe I didn't like

Nature Medicine volume 14, pages 1053–1057 (2008)Cite this article

Entering the genetic and molecular world

I was a hospital bacteriologist and an autopsy diener before I became a graduate student. Thus, I learned about the world of microbes from a practical standpoint before I learned the tools to perform research. The medical bacteriology of the 1950s focused on differentiating the 'good guys' from the 'bad guys', and a pathogen was simply defined as any organism that caused disease. In basic bacteriology I was taught that bacteria were Schizomycetes—'asexual primitive plants'. So, it was hard to think of them as being inherently virulent.

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Figure 1: Lab alumni reunion in 2004, Falkow/Tompkins home, Hamilton, Montana, USA.
Figure 2: Photo taken on 25 May 1967 during my lecture at the Symposium on Infectious Multiple Drug Resistance, held at the Georgetown University School of Medicine with support from the US Food and Drug Administration.
Figure 3: The US–Japan plasmid meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, November 1972.
Figure 4: Electron micrograph of Salmonella typhimurium entering into an M cell in the mouse intestine.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank S. Fisher and L.S. Tompkins for reading and commenting on this manuscript.

I was asked to write a commentary in conjunction with my selection to receive the Lasker∼Koshland award. In science, the operative word is more often 'we' instead of 'I'. Indeed, I was fortunate to have worked with so many talented and genuinely nice people during my career. The publication of this article happens to coincide with the publication of an autobiographical sketch The Fortunate Professor40, which I dedicated to my mentors, former students and colleagues. In that article, I wrote that my professional life could be summarized simply by a statement from the Talmud:

I learned much from my parents.

I learned more from my teachers.

I learned even more from my colleagues.

But I learned the most from my students.

Upon further reflection, I should add that all of us can learn a lot from the microbes as well.

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  1. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanley Falkow is the Robert W. and Vivian K. Cahill Professor of Microbiology and Immunology and of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, 299 Campus Drive, D039, Stanford, California 94305-5124, USA. falkow@stanford.edu,

    Stanley Falkow

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Falkow, S. I never met a microbe I didn't like. Nat Med 14, 1053–1057 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm1008-1053

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