In the well-watered groves of academe, most of us are content to gather
worshipful students and technicians in a shady nook to contemplate the
eternal verities and to plan extravagant feasts to celebrate our
contributions to "knowledge" and to the gradual improvement of the human
condition. As one convocation follows another, and as our funding
agencies pump billions of dollars into incremental research that ?lls
every possible pigeon-hole in which a gene makes a protein, a small
number of intellectual athletes seize a pivotal concept and plunge into
the real world. It is this small band of nimble and impossibly brave
intellectual halfbackswho win gamesin the real world, and this book is
the result of the drive and intellectual athleticism of its editor and
several of her contributors. Bacteria affect humans more than any other
life forms with which we share the blue planet, but our understandingof
these invisible companionshas developed in a staggering pattern,
crippled by our panic and consequent shifts of emphasis. When our race
was threatened by epidemic diseases, we visualized bacteria as swarms of
potentially lethal planktoniccells from which we must remain isolated by
sanitation and which we had to kill by immunization and chemical
antibacterial compounds. By the time this overriding threat had been
obviated, we began to examine na- ral and pathogenic ecosystems by
direct methods, and we were surprised to ?nd that planktonic bacteria
are comparatively rare and that most prokaryotes grow in
matrix-enclosedbio?lms.
