4 ideas
Gao Shiqi, a Chinese bacteriologist, caught encephalitis from his own laboratory work and was left paralysed. Unable to continue research, he wrote Jun'er zizhuan (1936), a popular-science book in which a bacterium tells its own life story. The book is still used in Chinese schoolbooks, a case of a scientist injured by the organisms he studied turning to public explanation of them.
Having the bacterium narrate in the first person moves the reader from the human view of germs as intruders to the microbe's view, in which people, animals, soil, water and air are simply territories to live in, travel through and feed on. From that vantage, 'infection', 'digestion' and 'decay' are not three separate phenomena but the same organisms occupying different hosts and niches, and the moral labels depend on whose interests are affected.
Disease-causing species are a small minority. Most bacteria break down dead plants, animals and waste into simpler substances that return to soil and air, and some live in the gut and help process food. Without microbial decay, dead matter would pile up and the nutrients locked in it would never be released for new life, so bacteria are a precondition of life's cycles rather than just a threat to it.
A bacterium reproduces by growing and splitting into two, and each daughter cell splits again, so the population doubles every generation. Under favorable warmth, moisture and food, one cell can give rise to astronomical numbers within hours.