Ed Yong – Carol's Notebook

Author: Ed Yong

Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic, and is based in Washington DC.

Ed cares deeply about accurate and nuanced reporting, clear and vivid storytelling, and social equality. He writes about everything that is or was once alive, from the quirky world of animal behaviour to the equally quirky lives of scientists, from the microbes that secretly rule the world to the species that are blinking out of it, from the people who are working to make science more reliable to those who are using it to craft policies. His stories span 3.7 billion years, from the origin of life itself to this month’s developments in Congress.

His work appears several times a week on The Atlantic’s website, and has also featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and many more. He has won a variety of awards, including the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award for biomedical reporting in 2016, the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences in 2016. He regularly does talks and radio interviews; his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.5 million people.

In general, microbes are not something I spend much time thinking about. I wash my hands to hopefully keep away germs, take my probiotic pill, and that's about it. I'm not one of those people who carry around a can of Lysol, which apparently can be a good thing. "So, here’s the irony: toilets that are cleaned too often are more likely to be covered in faecal bacteria." I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong made me think about the vast array of microbes in our world - helpful, harmful, and ones that can be both or neither. Yong touches on the evolution of microbes; the history of microbiology; symbiotic relationships among microbes; symbiosis between microbes and higher organisms; dysbiosis (unbalanced microbiomes that harm their hosts); how scientists study and identify microbiomes; research studies aimed at seeding hospitals and buildings with 'good microbes'; and much more. He writes in an entertaining, easy to understand way. He makes microbes fun. My family is probably...