Quotes by Bonnie Bassler

“I want to make a drug. I want the science to be more than imaginary, where I think, 'We're learning these fundamental principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' I think we are doing that, but I wan...”

“My job is to teach someone something they never knew, but it should not be like you're in a prisoner-of-war camp. I'm supposed to be teaching you but also entertaining you. You're giving me an hour...”

“I remember the day we found the gene for the inter-species signaling molecule like it was yesterday. We got the gene, and we plugged it into a database. And we immediately saw that this gene was in...”

“Think about all kinds of infectious diseases, like mumps or measles or chicken pox. When a virgin population encountered those pathogens, it ravaged the population, and now they're childhood diseas...”

“If a bacterium is trying to infect you, it won't secrete alone, because your immune system will block it. Bacteria will hide until they can all act together and make an impact.”

“When antibiotics became industrially produced following World War II, our quality of life and our longevity improved enormously. No one thought bacteria were going to become resistant.”

“Quorum sensing, or the control of gene expression in response to cell density, is used by both Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria to regulate a variety of physiological functions. In all case...”

“Quorum sensing-controlled behaviors are those that only occur when bacteria are at high cell population densities. These behaviors are ones that are unproductive when undertaken by an individual ba...”

“... if we could either keep harmful bacteria from communicating, or help beneficial bacteria to communicate, those could be new kinds of therapeutics that could be developed in the future.”