The danger is that some germ like staph will be will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it.

We genetically engineer bacteria.

Some people believe that this would spread uncontrollably, and that the bacteria would kill everything in its way.

Diarrheal disease organisms get transmitted in basically three ways.

And when they're transmitted through the water, unlike the first two modes of transmission, these pathogens don't rely on a healthy host for transmission.

As was subsequently explained by Iraq, it produced liquid bacterial biological warfare agents accepting a moderate risk of airborne contamination.

And the focus when I'm talking about the diarrheal organisms, as well as the focus when I'm talking about any organisms that cause acute infectious disease, is to think about the problem from a germ's point of view, germ's eye view.

There's also a small cicada, a micro bacteria transmitting leaf hopper, and in very dry weather there are lots of them.

The definition of pathogenic germs indicates any micro organism able to cause infectious disease.

And along comes pneumococcus or another bacteria, streptococcus and boom, they get a bacterial pneumonia.

If instead transmission to another host requires host mobility, then we expect that the winners of the competition will be the milder organisms.

You might wanna avert your gaze, because that is a newt about to regenerate its limb, and shaking hands spreads more germs than kissing.

A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time, the germs sure get the upper hand.

But if the host needs to be mobile in order to transmit the pathogen, then it's the benign ones that tend to be the winners.

The first thing that we ever read was in 1995 a little bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae.

The first is to create a kind of balloon structure, fill it with bacteria, then allow the sand to wash over the balloon, pop the balloon, as it were, disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it.

Sometimes, you get disease organisms that don't rely on host mobility at all for transmission.

UNAIDS have done good data available, finally, about the spread of HIV.

They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA.

A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it.

What happens is that bacteria are able to count how many of me and how many of you.

These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people.

And we know staph can do amazing things.

Already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose, instead, two great domains of microorganisms true bacteria and one celled organisms the archaea, which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota, the group that we belong to.

Italian Penal Code (article 438) sanctions with life imprisonment any action aimed at spreading pathogenic germs able to cause an epidemic (the related means of delivery are irrelevant).

This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell.

This is the bacterial Esperanto.

Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans.

And so we started to think if this really is about communication in bacteria, and it's about counting your neighbors, it's not enough to be able to only talk within your species.

So the task is to try to figure out how to determine whether or not you could get an organism like this to evolve towards mildness by blocking waterborne transmission, thereby allowing the organism only to be transmitted by person to person contact, or person food person contact both of which would really require that people be mobile and fairly healthy for transmission.

It could have lots of bacteria, it could have more than one virus, and it certainly has host genetic material.

Dr Noah's bacillus? Now, Jimmy, even you wouldn't release germ warfare.

Carole Lartigue led the effort to actually transplant a bacterial chromosome from one bacteria to another.

You will never annihilate the germs.

A piece of paper crawling with germs.

We couldn't have a germ theory of disease before we invented the microscope to see them.

What was actually interesting to us was not that the bacteria made light, but when the bacteria made light.

To take an example close to home there are over 500 species of bacteria now known friendly bacteria living symbiotically in your mouth and throat probably necessary to your health for holding off pathogenic bacteria.

And, after an initial cost of 60 bucks to buy the bacteria, which you'll never have to pay again, one cubic meter of bacterial sand would be about 11 dollars.

So replacing the bacteria DNA with virus DNA turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses that is, until it's so filled with viruses that it bursts.

It's different when a bacteria comes into the body that's a foreign object we want that out.

We heard that bacteria eat oil?

Without water, the bacteria won't survive.

But it's not bacterial pneumonia.

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead discovering deadly new viruses where they first emerge passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa before they claim millions of lives.