An example of an organism or two that happens to be quite immortal would be plant seeds or bacterial spores.

I actually chased the mycelium, when it stopped producing spores.

And so we see a mushroom here sporulating.

I was able to morph the culture into a non sporulating form.

And the spores are germinating, and the mycelium forms and goes underground.

Bacterial spores are thought now by scientists to exist as individual cells that are alive, but in suspended animation for as long as 250 million years.

But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non sporulating form.

At the end of 1987, the scope of the biological weapons work was further expanded and research into additional bacterial agents, such as Clostridium perfringens and fungal toxins, such as trichothecene mycotoxins, was carried out.

You don't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores can't grow in the acid.

The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection.

These are spores this is in their spores.

Now after sporulation, the spores repel.

The Life Box you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom.

Analysis of those samples indicated that certain areas of the site did contain elevated levels of Bacillus anthracis spores.

They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae.

You look in his intestines. There are billions of bacteria.

You could fly 100 Ph.D. students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores.

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

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.

And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are, they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony.

What if I could stick this molecule, slap it onto a bacteria that was pathogenic to me, that had just invaded my lungs?

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.

And I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house, and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores.

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

The bacterial genes express proteins that are toxic to corn boring insects, but that are harmless to birds, fish, and mammals, including humans. As the modified corn fends off insect pests, it also reduces the levels of the mold Fusarium, thereby reducing the levels of fumonisin.

These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people.

After they sporulate, they do rot.

And we know staph can do amazing things.

What happens is, you pour Bacillus pasteurii onto a pile of sand, and it starts filling up the voids in between the grains.

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.

So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria, and what we've found now is that in fact, bacteria are multilingual.

This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell.

This is the bacterial Esperanto.

The left hand part of the molecule is identical in every single species of bacteria.

Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans.

The biological weapons programme also began research on other agents, including ricin toxin and Clostridium botulinum spores.

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.

But when the bacteria grow and double and they're all participating in making these molecules, the molecule the extracellular amount of that molecule increases in proportion to cell number.

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.