THE BUGS

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:

They closed the fixed and staring eyes Which had been open until now And covered with a snowy cloth The gentle face and pallid brow; Some sobbed, while some in silence went Out of that mournful tenement.

The light, which burned within a glass Upon the floor, beside the pall Cast disproportioned shadows of The bed upon the chamber-wall; At times one could distinctly see The body outlined rigidly.

They bore her on their shoulders from The house into the temple, where They placed her on a catafalque Within a chapel; —left her there. With yellow tapers’ company And sable folds of drapery.

(trans. Jules Renard [1908])

Just a year ago we took for granted a world without infection. Few people know that, in the first half of the twentieth century, typhoid epidemics decimated whole neighborhoods; no one remembers how it was to live under the scourge of polio; worse still, we have already forgotten what went on with AIDS in the 1980s. The number people who really understand the dramas of microbiology, epidemiology, and their sister sciences is small, and their work is little known. But today we have COVID-19, which, although merely a virus, has come to give us humans a lesson in humility. It reminds us that we have always been at war with entities we cannot see and that we are more vulnerable than we think.

One might think that this generalized ignorance of matters connected with “the bugs” is taking too great a toll on our species at this moment: conspiracy theories, “anti-vaxxers,” shortsighted science policy, etc. And worst of all: the inability to follow simple basic rules. But the truth is that things have always been more or less the same, from the days of the black plague to the AIDS epidemic, not to mention leprosy and smallpox. It is just that today there are simply more people with the possibility to communicate massively whatever happens to be going through their heads. As José Saramago put it: “We write more, but we don’t write better.”

You can educate people, but instinctive fear will always trump reason in uncertain times. I don’t think the primary thing is even to aspire to having people educated about “the bugs.” What is indispensable is to have people who have learned to think, since all the rest flows from that. And among others things: to have the good sense to follow simple instructions.

One of the positive things about the pandemic (for every crisis opens up a wealth of opportunities) is that it is going to make us value a little more the progress we have made as a species. Never before in history has a vaccine been developed so quickly as it was this time; never before have we possessed the means to free ourselves in record time from such a scourge.

I hope that, as a result, there will be widespread interest in this world we are unable to see and that more people become aware of the metaphysical beauty it contains. Perhaps we will realize that, however much we may dull our sense of reality with apps, with streaming media, and with other conveniences, we must never forget that we share our planet with “the bugs,” who will always be there to remind us that our time here on earth (although it may be eternal for them) is limited, and that we should make the best of it by living for what matters most to us.

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!