Natural Defense ─ Enlisting Bugs and Germs to Protect Our Food and Health

For more than a century, we have relied on chemical cures to keep our bodies free from disease and our farms free from bugs and weeds. We rarely consider human and agricultural health together, but both are based on the same ecology, and both are being threatened by organisms that have evolved to resist our antibiotics and pesticides. Patients suffer from C.diff, a painful, potentially lethal gut infection associated with multiple rounds of antibiotics; orange groves rot from insect-borne bacteria; and the blight responsible for the Irish potato famine outmaneuvers fungicides. Chemical warfare is failing us.

Fortunately, scientists are finding new solutions that work with, rather than against, nature. Emily Monosson explores science’s most innovative strategies, from high-tech gene editing to the ancient practice of fecal transplants. There are viruses that infect and bust apart bacteria; vaccines engineered to better provoke our natural defenses; and insect pheromones that throw crop-destroying moths into a misguided sexual frenzy. Some technologies will ultimately fizzle; others may hold the key to abundant food and unprecedented health. Each represents a growing understanding of how to employ ecology for our own protection.

Monosson gives readers a peek into the fascinating and hopeful world of natural defenses. Her book is full of optimism, not simply for particular cures, but for a sustainable approach to human welfare that will benefit generations to come. 

Emily Monosson is an environmental toxicologist and writer. She is an independent scholar at the Ronin Institute and an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Unnatural Selection: How We are Changing Life, Gene by Gene and Evolution in a Toxic World: How Life Responds to Chemical Threats, and editor of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out.