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Tim Hayward has been in and around professional kitchens for years, and has long seen bacteria as the enemy, attempting to kill them at every opportunity and in every possible way. In this three-part series, he starts to wonder if things are quite as simple as that, and before long discovers that these tiny organisms are unlike anything he had ever imagined.

In this third and final episode, Tim finds unique and unfathomably precious communities of bacteria in unexpected places - and examines the Earth’s past, present and future through microbial goggles.

Contributors:

Pierce Bozeat, research scientist, CyanoCapture
Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, microbiologist, Rutgers University
Laura Hug, environmental microbiologist, University of Waterloo
Valeria Souza, biologist, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
Franciska de Vries, soil ecologist, University of Amsterdam

Extract from article by Roger Payne ‘I Spent My Life Saving the Whales. Now They Might Save Us’, Time 5th June 2023. Reading by Michael Goldfarb

Presenter: Tim Hayward
Producer and sound design: Richard Ward
Executive Producer: Rosamund Jones
A Loftus Media production for Radio 4