THE EXPERT’S OPINION
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THE BUGS Dante Alducin is a chemist and pharmaceutical biologist with a specialization in Leading People and Teams from the University of Michigan. He has twelve years of experience in the field of clinical research. He is the founder of the Blast! Academy and the host of the podcast Ruido Blast!
Imagine a black bubble with a green metallic sheen on a bed of gelatin: but it’s not a drop of sports car paint. It is in fact a miniature world: a bacteria colony, or what I like to call “the bugs.” I remember the days when I used to cultivate these bugs in their agar plates and petri dishes. I loved the whole process of obtaining those bubbles, of ridding the “temple” of its “evil spirits” with a cigarette lighter, of masterfully drawing the culture with a piece of wire, and of incubating it, like baking a cake. The result was a micro-universe with almost metaphysical implications: infinitely smaller beings than us, governed by conditions different from ours. For them, time passes at a velocity we would find dizzying: they are born and die in the blink of an eye. If, for some mysterious reason, they had the necessary nourishment, and conditions were right, they could cover the surface of the earth in a matter of hours, for they reproduce at unbelievable velocities. When one of them achieves an advantage within its medium, it can transmit it to its fellows as if it were using a USB flash
drive. That is just one of its many talents, surprising in so small a being. We have just recently learned that they have shaped the story of humanity in not so obvious ways. Take, for example, the case of tuberculosis toward the end of the nineteenth century: an illness that partly inspired the Romantic movement, in an age when life expectancy was far shorter than we can even imagine today. What was the fashion among the aristocrats of the time? People would get together in the homes of those in the final stages of tuberculosis to bewail the sorrows of life, to socialize… and to die. There was nothing more chic than dying of tuberculosis in those days. The ideal of beauty was a pale, thin face, a fashion inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which eventually developed into the Gothic look we know today. If you google the Madonna of the painter Edvard Munch (whose mother and sister both died of the same bug), you will see immediately what I am getting at about the romanticism of tuberculosis. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer described it well in his Rima LXXIII:
