The Microbiologist’s Response to a Changing world

The nature of our world is changing, inexorably and sometimes imperceptibly due to technological advanc-es, the growth of under-privileged populations, and the unstable dynamics of competing political systems. The new “information age” provides new ways of per-ceiving and interpreting the world. For instance, in the biological sciences, large data sets have been used to simulate biological systems in silico. Mankind is learn-ing to use information to predict and control complex events.