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Nobody likes getting colonized by microbial invaders.

Those little guys swimming around inside you, messing up your body's normal function,

hijacking yourselves to make more themselves,

meanwhile, giving you headaches or sniffles or stomach pains or even worse.

No, we want them out.

We take medicine to kill them or we wait for our immune system to hunt them down and root them out,

leaving us with pure, unpolluted human bits, right?

Not really.

Actually, the truth about our relationship with microbes

is much more complex. They not only fight on our side sometimes, most of the time we can't even

tell who is on which side, or if there are even sides. Maybe it's more like a big microbial

economy than a black and white battle. Today on the podcast, we're

going to dig into the life of microbes and the role they play in keeping us healthy and sick.

Do they help us? Do they hurt us? Or is the answer, as always, it depends. A word to today's parents,

today's episode is getting a little gooey. We can't talk about microbes without talking about

poo. It's always a conversational

risk when talking to biologists. So keep that in mind if you're playing this episode with

your little ones. I vote, let them listen. There's pooer in knowledge. See what I did there?

Either way, welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary microbial universe.

Music to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary microbial universe.

Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener Smith.

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