Name: Profile: Bonnie Bassler
Uploaded: undefined
Duration: undefined

NOVA ScienceNOW

The National Science Foundation

Koch Foundation

NOVA Science Trust Logo

the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

<div class="rich-text">(This video is no longer available for streaming.) Bonnie Bassler has been called the "Bacteria Whisperer," and even if she doesn't speak directly to microbes, she is passionate about them. Until recently, no one thought bacteria communicated with one another and coordinated their behavior. But Bassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton, has discovered "quorum sensing." In some cases, when certain bacteria sense that they are in a large enough group (a quorum), they mobilize to attack a host, triggering disease. The implications for medical science are huge.
</div>

Her insight into how bacteria "talk" has launched a revolution in biological and medical research.

<div class="rich-text">Her insight into how bacteria "talk" has launched a revolution in biological and medical research.</div>

Her insight into how bacteria "talk" has launched a revolution in biological research.

Profile: Bonnie Bassler

Body & Brain

<div class="rich-text"><h3>
 PROFILE: BONNIE BASSLER
</h3>

 PBS Airdate: January 9, 2007



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Some people have a special way with other
living things, They seem to understand them, even relate to them.


 You've heard of horse whisperers and maybe even dog whisperers. Well, in
this episode's profile, here's a scientist who is tuned in to some creatures I
guarantee you have never talked to. In fact, you can't even see them.


 She's been called the "Bacteria Whisperer."


 But with a whisper is never how Bonnie Bassler starts her day. This
MacArthur Fellow, and prestigious Howard Hughes Medical investigator, and
member of the National Academy of Sciences, starts each weekday in aerobics
class—as the teacher, of course.



 BONNIE BASSLER
 
 (Princeton University)
 
 :
 
 I have been teaching
aerobics for 23 years, more than half of my life. And everybody thinks I'm so
committed to this, and I'm so disciplined. And it's a big scam, because I would
never go, if I wasn't the teacher.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : But Bonnie is a teacher to the core, in
aerobics and in molecular biology at Princeton...



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 Who wants to talk to me about science?



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : ...where she also wants to see some
sweat.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 Five or ten minutes, get some science!


 If you want me to do it for you...



 STUDENT:
 
 Yeah?



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 ...I won't because it wouldn't kill you to learn a
little genetics.


 Come on, you guys!



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : In fact, ask Bonnie about bacteria, and
she just can't help teaching.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 Bacteria are single-celled organisms. Bacteria are the
model organisms for everything that we know in higher organisms. There are 10
times more bacterial cells in you or on you than human cells.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Bonnie and her lab work on how bacteria
talk to each other. That's right: bacteria talking. It's a process called
quorum sensing, and Bonnie's lab has been leading the way in understanding
exactly how it works.



 NED WINGREEN
 
 (Princeton University)
 
 :
 
 She's really the one who's
shown that this is something, that this is something that all these bacteria
are doing all the time. And if we want to understand them, we have to
understand quorum sensing.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 So I grew up some bacteria for you to see, and I want to
show you my favorite part, so you have to come with me into this room.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Bonnie has spent years studying vibrio
harveyi, marine bacteria that are harmless to humans and, triggered by quorum
sensing, glow in the dark. By themselves, or in small numbers, these bacteria
don't glow. They wait until they've assembled a quorum, that is, as they divide
and their numbers increase, they each release a signaling molecule.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 We call autoinducers but you can think of like
hormones.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : That is made by a gene in each of the
neighboring vibrio harveyi as a way of announcing, "Hey, I'm here, too."



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 They have these detectors on their membranes that you
can think of like little locks and keys. And the molecule goes in, and once
they feel that, then they know there's neighbors around.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : And when enough of these little guys have
gotten together to form a critical mass, they all light up at the same
time.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 So now, if I turn the lights off in the room, you're
going to see them make this beautiful bioluminescence.



 NED WINGREEN:
 
 One bacteria isn't able to make an impact by itself, but
if there are a lot of them, they can work together. So quorum sensing is the
way that they know, "Are there enough of us to undertake one of these group
activities?"



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial,
single cells. They are individual cells, but they act in communities, exactly
the way people do.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Bonnie was doing her post-doctoral work,
when she found the genes that allow for communication in vibrio harveyi. And
scientists from around the world yawned, because Bonnie's discovery was only in
this species of marine bacteria, and not in one that's dangerous to humans.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 There's these few bacteria that were models, e-coli and
salmonella, and if you didn't work on the models, then you worked on a
pathogen, something that was important for human health. And so this quorum
sensing, which—we didn't even call it this back then, because it was in
this luminous bacteria that doesn't even hurt a fish—it was never going
to be relevant for understanding even bacteria or higher organisms.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : But Bonnie believed otherwise. She
thought her bacteria could tell her more about how all bacteria communicate, so
she applied for a job to continue her work in quorum sensing.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 Oh, I applied to a lot of places for a job. I don't
know, 20 or 30 or 40. And I got two interviews and one job.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Yeah, but that one job was at Princeton
University.



 TOM SILHAVY
 
 (Princeton University)
 
 :
 
 I was chair of the committee
that hired Bonnie Bassler. I know people at other places...I don't want to name
names, but one of them said, "Why did you hire her?"



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Let's just say she did okay by landing at
Princeton, and Princeton's belief in Bonnie had a huge payoff: her lab
eventually discovered a second molecule used by her luminescent bacteria to
communicate. And this second molecule was nearly universal.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 We found it, originally, of course, in vibrio harveyi.
But then we could show that hundreds of bacteria made and used this molecule
and that it was in every bacterium anybody's heard about.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : That means that even dangerous bacteria
communicate by quorum sensing. Deadly pathogens turn deadly the same way that
Bonnie's bacteria turn on their light.


 Bonnie showed that there were two types of molecules that bacteria use for
communication, that bacteria are bilingual. One type of molecule is used for
communicating within their own species, and the other type, discovered by
Bonnie, is used to talk to every species around them.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 Bacteria live in unbelievable mixtures of hundreds or
thousands of species. Like on your teeth. There are 600 species of bacteria on
your teeth every morning. And so, in order to get these beautiful communities,
where they're working together and doing all these things, they have to know
who their neighbors are.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : And some of those neighbors are not
friendly. Using the molecule found by Bonnie's lab, bacteria know if they're
surrounded by friend or foe, or when it's safe to light up or attack. If they
don't have superior numbers, they won't act. Sometimes they team up across
species, but mostly, it's a tiny jungle out there.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 There's eavesdropping and free-riding and cheating. And
one guy's out there making a molecule, and the guy next to him eats it so that
the molecule disappears.



 NED WINGREEN:
 
 My gosh, these bacteria talking to each other across
species. And that's something that had really not been an accepted idea. This
was sort of just a crazy idea.



 TOM SILHAVY:
 
 What Bonnie did to show that different species of bacteria
could talk to each other really changes the landscape. And when that was
realized by the rest of the scientific community, Bonnie's career took off like
a rocket.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : But Bonnie was not launched by a
scientific family.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 We never talked about science. My mom was a stay-at-home
mom, my dad was a businessman, and my brother's a businessman, and my sister's
in politics, right? So we're just all over the map.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : She moved around a lot as a girl, but was
always kept grounded by her mother.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 My mom was the linchpin of this family. And I remember
her saying things to me like, "You know, when I went to college, you could be a
teacher or a nurse. Those were your two choices, as a woman," she goes, "but
Bonnie, you could be anything you want."



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Bonnie's mother died when Bonnie was just
a junior in college.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 I remember her telling me, when she was sick, that she
would take all the steps the same. So I think she got payoffs, even though she
didn't get the ones that like, you know, the world sees as the payoffs. Because
these are like very...they're tangible, acceptable things, you know? The
MacArthur, the National Academy, Howard Hughes, those are things that you can
write in a Christmas card, right? And she just would've written other
things.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : Big things like Bonnie marrying actor
Todd Reichart; little things like mercilessly beating her husband and
colleagues at board games. Biologist Eric Wieschaus won a Nobel prize, but this
night, lost to Bonnie.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 Yeah!



 TOM SILHAVY:
 
 I've taken enormous pride in what she's accomplished. I
would argue that our committee just did one hell of a fantastic job.



 NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
 
 : But as Bonnie sees it, her work has only
just begun. Quorum sensing is helping to shape a path to new drugs. Antibiotics
currently work by killing bacteria, and more and more bacteria have grown
resistant to these drugs. By using quorum sensing, it may become possible to
disrupt a pathogen's communication, to neutralize it. For the foreseeable
future, that's where Bonnie and her team will be putting their sweat.



 BONNIE BASSLER:
 
 I want to make a drug. I want the science to be more
than imaginary, where I think, "We're learning these fundamental principles,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I think we are doing that, but I want to do
something really practical. I want to actually, in my lifetime, help people.
</div>

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

Guam

U.S. Virgin Islands

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

US & Territories

NOVA investigates the story of cannabis from the criminalization that has disproportionately harmed communities of color to the latest medical understanding of the plant. What risks does cannabis pose to the developing brain? How much do we know about its potential medical benefits? As cannabis becomes socially accepted, scientists are exploring its long-term health consequences. (Premiered September 29, 2021)Check out a previously recorded panel discussion and audience Q&amp;A featuring experts and producers from "The Cannabis Question" <a href="https://youtu.be/nSTT5RZ_hxA">here</a>.

As state-legalized cannabis spreads, NOVA explores its little-known risks and benefits.

The Cannabis Question

A 2006 composite image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Telescope shows the chaos of baby stars in the Orion nebula some 1,500 light-years away. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI

With the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble era is gradually drawing to a close. Here are some highlights from the countless wonders Hubble has shown us during its 31 years in space.

10 spectacular Hubble Space Telescope images

A statue of Zheng He at the Sam Poo Kong Temple in Java, Indonesia. Image Credit: Budianto Santosa, Shutterstock

In the 1400s, Zheng He sailed thousands of miles around Asia and Africa in ships the size of soccer fields, spreading Chinese innovations like compasses and gunpowder in the process.

Transcript

Credits

Support Provided By