Might a newly-discovered class of microbe menace us with everything from arthritis to Alzheimers?
FT260 “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.” So declared Augustus de Morgan, developing a theme by Jonathan Swift in response to naturalists’ ability to find ever-tinier creatures with their new microscopes. A new class of microbe now threatens to upset the rules about how small a living thing can be, as well as splitting the medical community on whether they even exist. The microbes in question are known to their supporters as nanobacteria. Normal bacteria are typically between 0.3 and 5 micrometres (microns or µm) in length; the new discoveries can be as small as 0.02µm. According to proponents, they are dangerous, and are possibly connected to human diseases from Alzheimer’s to arthritis to cancer. These nanobacteria seem to have the Medusa touch, turning flesh into stone. In 1998 Olavi Kajander and Neva Çiftçioglu at the University of Kuopio in Finland isolated the nanobacteria from human blood, ur
