About the Author

Rob DeSalle is curator of entomology in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City. He is author or coauthor of dozens of books, several based upon exhibitions at the AMNH, including The Brain: Big Bangs, Behaviors, and Beliefs and A Natural History of Wine, coauthored with Ian Tattersall and published by Yale University Press. Susan L. Perkins is curator of microbial systematics and genomics at AMNH. Both live in New York City.

Reviews

"DeSalle and Perkins make it easy and fun to learn about this rapidly expanding field."—Publishers Weekly

"Welcome to the Microbiome gets it right—we are specks in the microbial world. We must deeply understand that fact, so we can make smarter decisions about our health."—Martin Blaser, author of Missing Microbes

"Leave it to two scientists and a scientific illustrator from our unsurpassed American Museum of Natural History to deliver such a delightful addition to our growing tome of literature on the microbial communities in, on and around us. Kudos!"—Jessica Snyder Sachs, author of Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World

"In Welcome to the Microbiome, DeSalle and Perkins provide nothing short of a primer to being human, a primer from the perspective of our ancient associations with microscopic species, the species that live in your teeth, ears and colon, the species that are sometimes described as being ‘on you,’ but as DeSalle and Perkins make clear, really are you. If you want to understand yourself, your flesh, your existence and struggles, what it is that you see and don't see when you stand naked in the mirror, read this book."—Rob Dunn, author of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart

"Desalle and Perkins have produced a beautifully comprehensive guide to the microbes that inhabit our body and how we know about them. This book should be of tremendous interest to anyone looking to peer behind the microbiome headlines and understand what is really going on."—Rob Knight, author of Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes

"This is a really great read and a timely summary of a field that has just exploded. The authors do a great job of reviewing the literature in an accessible and accurate way, and the vignettes are really entertaining."—Paul J. Planet, M.D., Ph.D., Columbia University