Bonnie Bassler

What's great about bacteria is you have a surprise every day waiting for you because they're so fast, they grow overnight.

The goal of scientists is you hope that the thing you're working on is bigger than the thing you're pipetting into that tube at that moment.

You can find bacteria everywhere. They're invisible to us. I've never seen a bacterium, except under a microscope. They're so small, we don't see them, but they are everywhere.

You live in intimate association with bacteria, and you couldn't survive without them.

Most bacteria aren't bad. We breathe and eat and ingest gobs of bacteria every single moment of our lives. Our food is covered in bacteria. And you're breathing in bacteria all the time, and you mostly don't get sick.

In my lab, we are always thinking about how cells, bacterial cells, can talk to each other and then organize themselves into enormous groups that function in unison.

As a kid, I loved doing puzzles, solving riddles, and reading mystery books. I also loved animals and always had pets.

I think being open-minded about what Nature is trying to tell you is the key to being creative and successful.

Science is difficult and slow no matter who you are. The hours are long, and the glorious 'aha' days come only very infrequently. You have to keep believing that if you put in the hours, those days will indeed come!

I am lucky because I get to work with the smartest, most creative, and most devoted group of students and postdoctoral fellows imaginable.

Everybody, as soon as they do a good experiment, their first thought in this lab is, 'That can't be right. I must have screwed it up. What did I do wrong?' And that's the best kind of scientist because they're filled with this self-doubt. And if I'm going to be honest, that's who I am. And it's what drives me.

I think the easiest application to help people understand what quorum sensing is and why it's important to study is to tell them that if we could make the bacteria either deaf or mute, we could create new antibiotics.