And so I begin #14DaysofMicrobiologyPoems. I reached out to the science Twitterverse earlier this month in search of 14 microbes worthy of poems. Here is Poem One, requested by @KateBradfordSci.
Peering under the microscope with Tracy Debenport
Science meets art on Tracy Debenport’s Instagram page, under.the.scope. It’s full of fluffy fungi on colorful agar plates and fungi transformed through the microscope. Debenport didn’t set out to be a collector of fungi. In a previous life she was a video editor for a reality TV show. But in 2011, after a near fatal…
Bdellovibrio, the microscopic vampire
I was inspired to write this poem (first poem on The Microbial Menagerie!) from a writing workshop I’ve been taking. We were reading Workshop by BIlly Collins, and there was a line in there “Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery? There’s something about death going on here.” that this is loosely based upon.
It’s a microbial world!
If you’re a frequent reader of the blog, you’ve probably realized that microbes are everywhere and they do all sorts of things on earth. They can make peppers spicy, turn snow pink causing it to melt faster, and ferments bread dough to make sourdough. Since the blog is now three (!!) years old, it’s about…
A Public Health Detective Story: John Snow, Cholera, and the Germ Theory of Disease
It’s 1854 in London. The third major cholera pandemic was racing through the city. Spreading from the Ganges delta of India since 1837, it’s claimed over a million lives mostly among Asia, Europe, and North America. Within the Soho district of Westminster, London, things weren’t looking good. The London sewer system had not reached Soho,…