Microbiology

"Since microorganisms play major roles in maintaining earth's life-support systems, we need to be especially careful about tinkering with decomposition and other recycling processes. ... What is needed now is a reasonable procedure for assessment at the ecosystem level that leans to the side of caution when there are a lot of unknowns. Accordingly, there is urgent need for increased support for research in environmental microbiology (that is, microbial ecology) and ecosystem science."

"Microbiology is a biologic science as well as an applied field of human or veterinary medicine. In consequence, its scope ranges from problems of molecular biology including biochemistry and pathology to those of human behavior and socioeconomics as they influence infection."

"Those scientists who grew up in the tradition of medical microbiology naturally knew that animal viruses should be treated as potentially dangerous. They could reassure themselves that animal virologists didn't have shorter life spans than the average, and Dulbecco and Stoker, for example, did their experiments on the open bench."