Oh, Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast episode 112.

Introduction to Microbiology.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, we're going to give an overview of the field of microbiology.

So this is going to be a fairly survey-level discussion.

So I'm going to talk about the different types of organisms that are studied

in microbiology, including protists, yeasts, bacteria and archaea, viruses, and preons,

with a little bit of discussion at the end about microbial growth and efforts to control

microbial growth. Recommended pre-listing for this episode is episode 10, an introduction to the

cell, just for a bit of background on some of the cell biology topics that will come up.

But I do emphasize that this episode is going to be only a fairly cursory discussion.

The idea is to give an overview of the different, of the sort of diversity of organisms that come under the sort of umbrella of microbiology, not to dive into any of the details too much,

and perhaps we'll be able to do that in some future episodes.

So, without further ado, let's make a start.

And I want to start before diving in and talking about the different organisms,

I want to just briefly discuss some of the history of the field of microbiology,

because throughout most of human history, people didn't know

about microbes. There were some ideas from the ancient world, including ancient India,

especially associated with the Jane tradition, that there were microbiotic or tiny forms of

life that couldn't be observed with the human eye, but existed kind of everywhere. But these

were really pre-scientific

ideas that people just sort of came up with. There was no empirical evidence in favor of this.

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