Mini but mighty: How microbes make the world

In the 1954 microbiology textbook, “Horton Hears a Who!” the title character, an elephant, must convince his friends not just that the Whos living on a speck of dust are important, but that they exist at all.

The same was true nearly three centuries earlier for Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. A Dutch draper with a knack for grinding and polishing lenses, Leeuwenhoek built tools that could magnify objects up to 400 times, about 20 times greater than his contemporaries’ microscopes. With these meticulously crafted instruments, Leeuwenhoek became the first person known to directly observe bacteria and protozoa, sperm cells and blood cells.

At first, not everyone bought Leeuwenhoek’s claims that the soil, water, and even our own bodies were teeming with life too small for human eyes to see. His 1676 letter to the British Royal Society, his 18th to the learned academy, includes testimonials from a Lutheran minister, a notary, a barrister, and five other witnesses. With the help of another pioneer of