COLI IS TRAILED BY thousands of personal historians. They chronicle the birth of sickening new strains in Omaha and Osaka. They trawl streams, lakes, and the guts of kangaroos. They carefully observe the peculiar ways of mutant strains. As the mutants are passed from lab to lab, frozen in stock centers and thawed for new experiments, scientists draw family trees to track their dynasties. Aside from ourselves, we have chronicled no other species so thoroughly. The written history of E. coli is now far too big for any single person to read in a lifetime. But it is both vast and shallow. It begins only in 1885, with Theodor Escherich’s first sketches of bunches of rods. Archaeologists can offer a few clues to E. coli’s pre-Escherich existence. In 1983, English peat cutters discovered the body of a 2,200-year-old man preserved in a bog near Manchester. The man had been ritually killed: someone had clubbed him on the head, slit his throat, wrapped a cord tightly around his neck, and then pushed him into the bog.
