So, since pretty much every other first world country is beating us in all quantifiable metrics except number of weight loss books published per capita, in an effort to turn the tide we thought it'd be a good idea to feature a science career today. We considered neurophysiologist, astrophysicist, or marine biologist, but in none of those fields is there anything but the most fleeting chance you'd have the opportunity to smear fecal matter on a petri dish in an effort to identify precisely what kind of bacteria is squirming around in a given person's poo. Well, we would not be doing our due diligence to your education if we neglected this fascinating endeavor, so, naturally, we settled on microbiologist.

Microbiology is a scientific discipline dealing in really small, usually icky things. It comes from the following Greek words: the prefix "bio," which means "life," "-ology," which means "the study of whatever the prefix meant," and the pre-prefix, "micro," which means "very, very tiny, about the size of Mickey Rooney" (100 bonus points to anyone who gets this theme song reference).

Microbiologists owe their careers largely to a Dutchman named Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, generally considered to be the father of microbiology. In the late 17th century, Leeuwenhoek (whose name, it is important to note, can be rearranged to spell "Wee Nuke El Ho") was building better magnification lenses than anyone else, and constantly writing letters to the Royal Society in which he explained how he used those lenses to look at teeny tiny squiggly things he called animalcules (now known as microorganisms) and described in admirable detail their characteristics and behaviors. The Royal Society, whose magnification technique up until then had been to squint really hard, thought this was a swell development and proclaimed his lenses a major improvement on their method. For one thing, squinting for too long produced some nasty headaches, so Leeuwenhoek's technique sounded fantastic.

Roughly two centuries later, Louis Pasteur, the famous French microbiologist, achieved even greater notoriety than his predecessor, a fact leading historians ascribe to his genius, his innovation, and his last name, which "was way easier to spell." Pasteur made major breakthroughs in vaccinations, pasteurization (named after him, if you couldn't tell), germ theory of disease causation, disease prevention, and microbial fermentation, which eventually lead to other breakthroughs in microbrewery technology, a feat for which we all owe him a solemn debt of gratitude.

Anyway, one thing lead to another, better microscopes were invented, even more really tiny things were discovered and studied, blah blah blah, and here we are today with microbiology as an indispensible part of both the scientific and medical communities, with thousands of scientists indispensably studying just gazillions of super tiny things. There are even sub-disciplines within microbiology, so you can specialize in the study of specific super tiny things. Virology, for example, is the study of viruses. There is also immunology, which is the study of how the immune system functions. Mycologists study spoors and funguses, field epidemiologists sometimes go out and hunt new diseases in remote parts of the world, and bacteriologists study the Kardashians.

Typically, microbiologists work in laboratories, usually for universities, government organizations (the Center for Disease Control, for example), or private sector tech companies. Plenty work as lab techs in hospitals and medical centers growing cultures from samples taken from patients. At the current time (7:24 pm), microbiology is a hot subject because of various disease outbreaks around the world, Ebola being the most worrisome. Also because of the ridiculous zombie apocalypse craze, which for reasons unclear to us absolutely will not go away, and, if it ever happens for real (no), is apparently expected to be the result of some weird killer mutant alien virus or something. If you're very lucky, by the time you read this, you won't have a clue what we're talking about, which will be all the better for you.

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