It's Friday, August 12th, 2016, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indrae Viscontas.

And I'm Kishorehari. Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

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inquiring minds. One amazing stat I heard recently was that we're outnumbered 10 to 1 in terms of the number of microbes in our

bodies to the number of cells that actually, a number of human cells that exist in our body.

Are we sure about that?

Yeah, that number is not right. New data seems to indicate that it's more a 50-50 split.

There's about 39 trillion microbes in our body and 30

trillion human cells. But it brings up this amazing question. We often talk so much about

the human system being the one we look at when it comes to disease and evolution, but we are almost

ignoring this whole other ecosystem that exists within us. And that's why this week I was so

excited to talk to Ed Yong. Ed Yong is one of my favorite science writers out there. He's an

award-winning science writer who reports for the Atlantic, and he has his first

book out called I Contained Multitudes, which is about the amazing partnerships between microbes and

animals, both humans and mammals like, which is now out. And Ed is just brilliant when it comes to

...