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Tim Hayward has been in and around professional kitchens for years, and has long seen bacteria as the enemy, attempting to kill them at every opportunity and in every possible way. In this three-part series, he starts to wonder if things are quite as simple as that and, before long, discovers that these tiny organisms are unlike anything he had ever imagined.

In this second episode, Tim encounters a massive steel tank in which bacteria are manufacturing medicinal molecules, finds out how forest microbes are changing human immune systems at an urban daycare centre in Finland, and comes face-to-face with something altogether astonishing - a microscopic organism that resembles a lunar lander, a bacteriophage (phage).

Contributors:

Alexandra Adams, chemical engineer, Stanford University
Aude Bernheim, microbiologist, Pasteur Institute
Martha Clokie, microbiologist, Centre for Phage Research at the University of Leicester
Paul Turner, microbiologist, Yale University

Presenter: Tim Hayward
Producer and Sound Design: Richard Ward
Executive Producer: Rosamund Jones
A Loftus Media production for Radio 4