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

"Gut Garden , again, 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. We started with just over 100 and then I had to do a first cull. That was often books that just weren’t science or just 10 pages long and part of a series that’s just churned out like a conveyor belt. Then the judges were sent around 50 books and we had to get it down to six. We came up with our own shortlist of 12. Then we tried to see whether there was commonality and actually there was surprisingly little—which shows you, actually, how good these books were. It was really, really tough and there were so many of them where I thought, ‘Wow, this is a great book!’ Then we had long conversations. I think everybody had their mind changed—the book that they thought was a dead cert for not being shortlisted all of a sudden was shortlisted. We were all very open-minded and I really enjoyed the process. I thought it was great. I don’t know. I have children myself and they’re both studying science at university. They didn’t really start reading science books until they were in their teens. A combination of things: it’s what they enjoyed, it’s what they were naturally good at. I’m a scientist, my father was a scientist, their other grandfather was an engineer. They are not the type of people we are trying to aim the books at, they’re more for somebody who wouldn’t naturally be thinking about science. In fact, I’m always encouraging my children to read and write because I think that’s so important in science. I always say to my PhD students, ‘You can do some great work, but if you don’t write it up well and publish it, you might as well not have done it. It’s not going to help anybody.’ So, I think the communication of science is crucial—as important as doing the science itself. “I think the communication of science is crucial—as important as doing the science itself” In terms of books, sometimes it’s quite difficult to predict what a child will like. Often, children will be mesmerized by a book that when you look at it, there are a lot of facts. It’s not necessarily great pictures. It’s not necessarily a great format. But there’s something about it that’s compelling. Thinking of myself as a child, it was a series of books published by Time Life on everything to do with the natural world and physical sciences. I just found it really fascinating and would flip through it on the weekends. I think there are more, better books out there. There are also definitely some books with scientific flaws. There are also some books that aren’t making much of an effort to captivate people. But of the 100 or so we looked at I would say there were a great many that were excellent. Definitely."