While researching mushrooms, food writer Eugenia Bone became fascinated with microbes—those life forms that are too small to see without a microscope, quietly and efficiently living inside other organisms (including people). Soon realizing the difficulty of the subject, she enrolled at Columbia University to study Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, resulting in a revelatory understanding of these rapidly-evolving organisms. Making the case that biology is a vast conspiracy of microbes, Bone demystifies the subject and demonstrates how essential microbes are to life on earth, while also sharing her humorous experiences as a middle-aged mom returning to academia.