I have long known that bacteria living in
the digestive systems of human beings play an extremely important role in the
digestion and absorption of food. I
sometimes wondered idly, whether these bacteria actually thought of my colon as
their “world” -- whether they played, studied, worked, married and reproduced
within my gut, with absolutely no awareness of me as a larger entity housing
them. Anytime I took an antibiotic to
take care of some infection, these bacteria probably wondered at this new
cataclysmic “world event” that was annihilating them in large numbers. When I had a bout of food poisoning, they
probably thought there was a tsunami taking place in their world. A bout of acute acidity and biliousness
probably had them shaking their heads at each other over the changes in the
environment (“global acidity”), and the increasing fickleness of the weather.
I took my thinking a step further and
wondered whether a set of bacteria actually adopted other bacteria (or yeasts
or viruses or bacteriophages, or whatever) as pets and / or workers. Or set up armies and fought with each other –
with the result that I felt I was ailing, without quite understanding why. Did they set up hierarchies and compete with
one another for various resources – the stuff I often unthinkingly stuffed in
my mouth as food? When I drank water,
did they wonder at the sudden downpour and when I was dehydrated, did they
speak of the drought?
