- And now I'd like to welcome you all. This is our final University Roundtable of the Spring semester. I'm Renee Meiller and I am a member of the committee that chooses our speakers. Before we begin, please join me in thanking this year's sponsors of the University Roundtable. Those include the Office of Learning and Talent Management, the Chancellor's Office, the Wisconsin Union and the Office of the Secretary of the Academic Staff. We are very lucky to have today's speaker back at UW-Madison. Jo Handelsman earned her PhD here at UW Madison in Molecular Biology, after which she enjoyed a 24-year career at our university. That included 22 years as a faculty member in Plant Pathology and another two years as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Bacteriology. She left briefly to conduct some important business. In addition to serving as a Professor at Yale University, she also was Associate Director for Science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy serving under former President Barack Obama. We are excited this Plant Pathologist has, forgive my pun, returned to her Wisconsin roots. Jo now is Director of our Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. And as her laboratory name might suggest, she also oversees the Handelsman Lab in the Institute. Her group focuses on understanding diversity in microbial communities and their role in infectious disease. In addition to her service as Director of the Discovery Institute, she is a Vilas Research Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology. She also is in high demand as a lecturer, so we're excited to have her today, for example she recently spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is an honor and pleasure to introduce her today. Jo Handelsman, Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, welcome.  [applause]  - Well thank you, Renee, for the lovely introduction and the welcome back to Wisconsin, which I can say has been just an absolute delight and a privilege to experience over the last year. It's been great to be in Wisconsin, at the university and at our wonderful Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, so, thank you again for welcoming me. Well, it's a real pleasure to be here. I, in the past, in my past life in Madison I was a great fan of the Roundtable because I always found it such a great place to meet interesting people from across campus. So I hope you've all had enough time to meet your table mates and learn something about another part of campus. I'm going to tell you today about another part of campus as well as a part of the world that you may not think about too much, a part of the world that we can't see, by definition, because it's microscopic, but nonetheless is what drives most important elements of our planets and our bodies and everything else around us. And so I'm going to talk about the, what I call The Microbial Planet, from a perspective of an idea that has bothered me forever, that even though people don't appreciate microorganisms, we call them germs and we disrespect them in all sorts of ways, all we seem to want to do is get rid of them if you watch modern television. Microbes in fact do run all of the important processes in us and around us and keep our Earth healthy, keep ourselves healthy and I'd like to, today, convince you of that. Somebody once called me a lobbyist for the microbe, so I apologize if this sounds like an ad, but I do market my microbes because it is a fact that the microbes rule the Earth and rule us and I hope to convince you of that today. So I want to cover four questions. First, what are microbes? Because people often hear the word and they're not quite sure what that encompasses. And then why do we think they've gotten such a bad name. Why do we talk about them as germs and bad things that we should wash away or sterilize away? And then ask the question, do microbes make us human? And I think this is becoming both a philosophical question as well as a biological one that is quite serious. How much of who we are, as humans and as functional beings, both physically and m