WEDNESDAY YACHTING LUNCHEON

Hosted by Ron Young

March 20, 2024

Living in a Microbial World: Symbiosis and the Concept of the Individual 

Margaret McFall-Ngai, PhD, Distinguished Scholar, Biology and Biological Engineering, Caltech, Pasadena

Recent advances in molecular methods have enabled biologists to define the diversity of the biological world more accurately than ever. Emerging data convincingly demonstrate that the vast diversity of evolved life is microbial, and the evolution of plants and animals in the last sixth of the earth's history has occurred as a patina upon a microbe-dominated landscape. Exciting new data reveal that healthy plants and animals require intimate, life-long and coevolved relationships with the microbial world. These new findings are providing evidence that our biosphere does not exist as individual organisms upon which natural selection occurs, but rather as complex, nested ecosystems. Margaret McFall-Ngail is a Guggenheim fellow, Moore Scholar and ARCS Foundation Scientist of the Year.