The Making of a Microbe Hunter

Although ordinary people know scarcely anything about microbes, they are becoming increasingly aware of their importance as governments and their media use the threat of killer plagues to manipulate them. But there is much more to microbiology than annual plagues and politics. Joe Robinson, author of two popular biographies, The Life and Times of Francie Nichol of South Shields and Tommy Turnbull - A Miner’s Life, is a microbiologist who has worked in many different fields, both in Britain and abroad. His adventures as a young microbiologist (the ’microbe hunter’ of the title), which include two years in the Royal Army Medical Corps, are highly entertaining as he encounters as motley a collection of human beings as one might find anywhere. By reading this book we learn something of microbiology, but more about the kind of people who work in it, because the book is primarily about such people, some likeable, some of them less so, but all of them treated in an amusing light.