Gut Garden: A journey into the wonderful world of your microbiome

“Gut Garden…was a fascinating book. You’d have to be living under a rock right now not to realize that viruses and microbes are very important to us and can have good and bad effects. This is not my field, but I know we’re constantly learning more and more about these microbial communities both in our body and in nature and everywhere, really. They point out in the book that there’s orders of magnitude more microbes in our body than there even are cells: in a sense, we’re just a host for these microbes. It’s really nicely presented. It’s clever the way it goes through the roles that the microbes play: in digestion preserving food, in our health when things go wrong, how our body tries to counteract this. There are some really good facts, like how they can lie dormant for years. There are even some speculations about what your appendix might be used for. It’s really good and this is the type of book that 10 or 20 years ago you wouldn’t have been able to write, because we didn’t know a lot of this stuff. It’s a really fast-moving field, and this is not your typical science book. We all enjoyed it.” Read more...

The Best Science Books for Kids: the 2020 Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize

Mike Kendall, Scientist