On my recent visit to New York, I had the great pleasure of spending time with Bonnie L. Bassler, and what struck me first was not simply the brilliance of the science, though there is plenty of that. It was the delight. The sparkle. The sense that here was one of the world’s great scientists speaking about bacteria not as little villains lurking beneath the sink, but as characters in an ancient drama: communicating, counting, collaborating, misbehaving, and occasionally plotting with chemical elegance.
Bassler is the Andrew K. Golden University Professor at Princeton University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She has received honours that would make a less lively person unbearable – a MacArthur Fellowship, the Shaw Prize, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, and most recently the National Medal of Science. Yet what animates her is not ceremony, but curiosity. The pure, electrifying pleasure of finding out.
Her path to bacteria began almost by accident. She entered college intending to become a veterinarian, discovered rather quickly that it was not for her, and wandered into biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology. At nineteen, she saw a notice looking for students to volunteer on either a cancer project or a bacterial project. She imagined, with the magnificent innocence of youth, that she might join the cancer lab and cure cancer. Instead, she was assigned to bacteria. She was disappointed.
A few decades later, she is still with them.
“Bacteria, in Bassler’s hands, are not invisible villains. They are characters in an ancient drama.”
What Bassler discovered is that bacteria are not the silent loners of popular imagination. They talk. Not with words, naturally – bacteria have never been much for conversation at dinner – but through chemical molecules released into their environment. These molecules travel from cell to cell, detected by receptors on bacterial surfaces. As the molecules build up, bacteria effectively count one another and decide when there are enough of them to act together.
This is called quorum sensing.
The phrase sounds almost parliamentary, as if the bacteria have gathered in committee to discuss a motion. In truth, the process allows them to synchronise behaviour across a population. Certain bacterial actions are useless if performed alone but powerful when performed by the group: virulence, biofilm formation, the exchange of DNA. The tiny becomes formidable through coordination.
It is both marvellous and faintly alarming.
For those of us in Aotearoa, where life is so bound to sea, soil, farms, forests, kitchens, hospitals and coastlines, Bassler’s work is a reminder that bacteria are not merely things to fear. They are also our collaborators. The human body is inhabited by trillions of bacteria, performing biological work our own genomes cannot do. They help keep humans, animals and plants alive. They are our 24-hour partners, as Bassler puts it, quietly helping make us who we are.
Of course, bacteria can also make us terribly unwell. They deserve some of their bad press. But Bassler asks for balance: not sentimentality, not panic, but attention.
“The tiny becomes formidable through coordination.”
Modern medicine has long treated harmful bacteria as enemies to be killed. Antibiotics, Bassler is clear, are among humanity’s greatest public health achievements. We need them. But the problem of resistance grows more urgent, especially when antibiotics are used indiscriminately. Bassler’s laboratory dreams of another strategy: not killing bacteria outright, but confusing them. Interrupting their communication. Stopping the meeting before the plot is agreed.
If harmful bacteria need quorum sensing to work together and cause infection, then anti-quorum-sensing therapies may prevent their collective attack. Because such treatments confuse bacteria rather than kill them, the hope is that resistance may develop more slowly, giving these therapies a longer useful life.
This is not abstract science tucked politely behind laboratory glass. One in seven deaths globally is caused by infectious disease, Bassler notes, with the burden falling most heavily on underdeveloped regions. Lack of clean water alone contributes to more than 1.4 million preventable deaths each year. New antimicrobial strategies are urgently needed, yet developing them is not, in her words, particularly en vogue. She finds that tragic.
She is right to.
“Bassler’s laboratory dreams of stopping the meeting before the plot is agreed.”
What makes Bassler such a compelling figure is that she refuses the tired idea that science is cold, boring or reserved for a priesthood in white coats. She worries about public distrust of science, and about people imagining they are “not science people.” To her, science is everywhere: food, medicine, weather, transport, hygiene, technology, communication, decision-making. It is not a distant discipline. It is a way of noticing the world with sharper eyes.
And discovery, she says, is euphoric. Scientists return again and again to the memory of discovery, that intoxicating moment of being the first person in the world to have an insight.
Still, she does not romanticise the difficulty. To young people in Aotearoa wondering whether science might be for them, her advice is wonderfully generous: difficulty is not proof you are bad at science. It is proof the work is worthy. Failed experiments, roadblocks and imperfect grades are not signs of inadequacy. They are part of entering the unknown.
In my view, Bonnie Bassler reminds us that the world is alive with conversations we cannot hear. In our bodies, in the soil, in the water, in the hidden kingdoms beneath ordinary life, bacteria are sending messages, making decisions, building communities, causing harm, sustaining health.
The secret life of bacteria is not small.
It is simply very, very close.
Roger Wyllie, View Mag