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All civilizations, from the Egyptians to our days, have always been more interested in carrying out great performances that can be appreciated by all their subjects than for those that cannot be easily observable and admired. The pyramids, Christian temples, the Colosseum, the Roman pantheons or the French pantheon, the great architectural works of industrial Europe or the universal exhibitions reveal the secret inclination of men before great human achievements. Many of these constructions have had the purpose of bending human will to mysterious forces to protect their lives, as in ancient Egypt or medieval Europe. Others have been erected to show the power of a country, such as the park created in 1939, an icon of the explosion of the successes of the USSR economy, today called the All-Russian Exhibition Center, where visitors can contemplate a gigantic rocket launcher and be frightened, as if they were Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, at the prospect of the political conditions of a new cold war returning.
The fascination with the grand, with what reduces man to the scale of a dot on a map, finds its culminating representations in the atomic bomb of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these monumental human scenographies. The atomic bomb has become an aesthetic icon of the horror of the limits that human achievements should not cross. The conquest of space in its spacecraft and the immense darkness that surrounds them is another image that links the human spirit to being more interested in looking through a telescope than through a microscope. The forces that dominated the end of the 19th century and the 20th century have been more concentrated on investigating the large than the small; energies put at the service of great wars, genocides, or nuclear disasters like Chernobyl. The tsunami in Indonesia or the earthquake in Mexico have more effect on our psyche than the thousands of deaths from HIV/AIDS. Immense magnitudes leave a deep trace in memory, while small or individual ones are forgotten or simply ignored. This tendency for the fascination with the grand in which Western culture was immersed in the 20th century has begun to change in the 21st century, where human efforts are concentrating on small great things, such as genetics or microbes.
In his fascinating book The Gene, an Intimate History, popular science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee puts us on the trail of a human adventure that dates back to the late 19th century, and which is now beginning to acquire its full meaning and potential in relation to the study of genetic manipulation and commercialization. The author explains how in 1962, upon deciphering the triple code of DNA, The New York Times published an article about "the explosive future of human genetics." Once the code was revealed, The New York Times established the possibility of subjecting human genes to any intervention. "It is certain that some biological bombs that will soon explode [after the deciphering of the genetic code] will rival even the atomic bomb in consequences for human beings. Some of them will be the possibility of determining the basis of thought... and the development of remedies for conditions now incurable, such as cancer and many tragic hereditary disorders." In a way, The New York Times's prediction is beginning to come true as we begin to internalize that it is possible to be repaired, cured, or improve our genetics. The genetics bomb precisely establishes that the cosmos it yearns to discover is within us and not in the confines of space. This represents a leap inward, towards the small, which allows us to realize that, if we are concerned about the future, our children will be concerned about the future of the future. It is imperative to know who we are to face the futures we are heading towards as a species, but above all, we do not want to leave anything concerning our health and quality of life to chance. The journey of genetics opens the doors to established posthumanism, as Rosi Braidotti explains in her essay The Posthuman, that "technologies actively contribute to the way humans develop an ethics." In the same sense of appreciating that the explosion of the small is changing our way of being in the world, we find Ed Young's surprising study, I Contain Multitudes, in which he observes the microbes that inhabit us as a broader way of seeing life. Ed Young states that "microbes have always ruled the planet, but today, for the first time in history, they are in fashion." Biologist Margaret McFall-Ngai appreciates that "it has been fun to watch people start to realize that microbes are the center of the universe and how this field is beginning to flourish. We now know that they constitute the great diversity of the biosphere that lives in intimate association with animals, and that animal biology was shaped by interaction with microbes. In my opinion, this is the most important revolution biology has known since Darwin." Once it has been shown that microbes control fat storage and the formation of new blood vessels, we are on our way to discovering how the manipulation of the microbiome will affect our way of life. In Amsterdam is Micropia, the world's first museum dedicated to microbes. Its visit allows us to confirm that what is seemingly small is so important and decisive in our lives that it rises before us like new cathedrals that will even modify what we believe.
Featured image: Electron micrograph of Staphylococcus epidermidis bacteria in extracellular matrix.