I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
About this ebook
Your body is teeming with tens of trillions of microbes. It's an entire world, a colony full of life.
In other words, you contain multitudes.
They sculpt our organs, protect us from diseases, guide our behaviour, and bombard us with their genes. They also hold the key to understanding all life on earth.
In I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong opens our eyes and invites us to marvel at ourselves and other animals in a new light, less as individuals and more as thriving ecosystems.
You'll never think about your mind, body or preferences in the same way again.
'Super-interesting... He just keeps imparting one surprising, fascinating insight after the next. I Contain Multitudes is science journalism at its best' Bill Gates
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2017
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2017
Discover more
Ratings and reviews
- Flag inappropriate
About the author
Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and an internationally bestselling author. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller and shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize. His second book, An Immense World, won the Royal Society Science Book Prize and was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk award in 2021 for his coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024.
His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, National Geographic, New Yorker and Wired, among others. He also regularly gives talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.9 million people.
He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Liz Neeley, founder of Liminal Creations, and his corgi, Typo. He is almost certainly looking at birds right now.
