Persisters are the secret to the bacteria’s long life

If you ‘Google Scholar’ MH Dawson (and yes I say its a verb !) you might start noticing an underlying pattern to his universe-ranging array of research areas of interest.

Dawson had a unfashionable fascination with the various forms that bacteria can take.

Un-fashionable because popular eugenics infected all scientific thought, often unconsciously, in the years before 1945 (and for what has turned out to be a very long time afterwards as well.)

Eugenics basically is the un-tested belief that reality would be better if every object and being was found in only one - perfect - form of itself.

In bacteria, the conventional scientific view was thus that only the “S” form was the normal form : mobile, virile and virulent (their words not mine). Only the “S” form was fully 100% red-bloodedly male.

Dawson took the unconventional path, revealing an ‘unnatural’ interest in all sorts of weird variants.

R forms and M forms and L forms.

But also P forms and even Q forms and the V or B forms.

L Forms had no cell walls, that tough yet flexible wall usually seen as bacteria’s most unique and vital feature, enabling it to survive in ever-changing liquid environments from ultra pure water to highly salted water.

But since bacteria walls are also the signal to alert the immune defences to attack bacteria, their absence helped these weirdly misshaped variants to survive where their stronger S relatives failed.

R forms were clingers, non-mobile, domesticated, non-virile, non-virulent : female in other words. Second Rate.

They live for our normal lifetime , for instance, as pneumococcus R in the throats of many of us ——-while their flashy virulent S cousins either are killed attempting to create a lung filled with pneumonia, or if they do succeed, die along with the patient !

M forms had a lot of gooey Mucus (M) around them that made them less vulnerable to being gobbled  up by the body’s defenders. Less mobile but also less dead....

P forms were those pesky 1% of a bacterial population who survived whatever weapons humanity hurled at them, Persisters, who creep out weeks later unharmed ready to resume war after the doctors had already held their Victory parade.

Q forms were bacteria engaged in Quorum Sensing, acting collectively based on the exchange of chemical signals, usually to enhance their collective chances of survival in dire times.

V vegetative forms survive by making a massive assembly of bric a brac attached to a lot of hardening mucus that in turn is attached to something firm, like a heart valve. They then hide inside while water passage bring in food and take out waste.

They were a leading cause of death by causing , to use the then feared and dreaded term, ‘invariably fatal endocarditis’.

Ironically, death usually came from the non-virulent form of strep bacteria, not the virulent forms !

Today we call them B forms, B for biofilm : same thing, different name.

Bacteria are the smallest weakest stupidest forms of life in the Universe, yet they have survived for at least 4 billion years while the bigger and smarter have long gone extinct.

How to explain this paradox ?

Well humanity has always practised eugenics, in an unconscious way, and still does.

As do many other larger species.

If don’t actually execute or abandon those among us who are born physically or mentally formed different from the ideal, we still tend not to marry them or give them the good jobs.

In evolutionary terms, they are likely to die off, in reproductive successful terms, over the long run.

Bacteria don't choose sexual partners and so their weird variants survive, or not, on a more basic environment-oriented basis.

Weird form bacteria often die off before reproducing or reproduce much more slowly than the more currently common forms.

But bacteria are so small and reproduce so fast that there are always lots of weird variants about.

And when circumstances change in a wink of an eye and the normal die off and the weird survives, (“PERSISTS”), even a single survivor can become a million strong colony in a few days.

Dawson saw that bacteria survived against all odds because, unlike humans, they had a constantly wide wide wide gene pool, and were not always trying to limit and purify their gene pool.

He didn’t actually directly fight Hitler in WWII, but Dawson did intellectually fight Hitler’s hundreds of millions of fellow travellers among the middle and upper classes of the world.

For being opposed to Hitler’s particularly virulent form of eugenics should never blind us to the fact that popular eugenics was a commonplace in educated thought in those years.

It survives today in the fact that a majority of Americans believe that if you can’t financially provide for your own health care, you shouldn’t look to other taxpayers to pick up the slack : literally, Survival of the Financially Fittest....