Did Bacteria Invent Communications?

Communications may be a fundamental principle of life. At least, that’s one of the big ideas I took away from Bonnie Bassler’s TED talk a few months ago.

A brilliant molecular biologist at Princeton University,
Dr. Bassler studies how bacteria use chemical signals to communicate with each another, enabling them to act in concert to mount attacks and coordinate defense.

This behavior — called “quorum sensing,” or bacterial communication — used to be considered a rare phenomenon. Dr. Bassler contends that nearly all bacteria do it and most do it all the time. These tiny single-celled organisms can distinguish between their own and other species, “speaking” one language within their own species and communicating with other bacteria in an interspecies language, like a form of “bacterial Esperanto.”

The pharmaceutical industry is paying careful attention to her work, since Dr. Bassler’s discoveries suggest the possibility of a new generation of antibiotics that work by interfering with the communication among pathogenic (bad) bacteria … especially resistant strains.

I have to confess, however, that as a public relations consultant, what moved me most was the notion that communicating is as natural — and fundamental — as eating, breathing or reproducing. In fact, the impulse to communicate may be hardwired in virtually every living thing.

Do Ethics Matter? Yes!

Our job as PR practitioners is to build connections and trust, so ethics ought to be top-of-mind for us at all times, whether we work for corporations or public relations/investor relations firms.

We’ve already experienced the consequences of ethical lapses on the corporate side. And once the U.S. Presidential Election really gets underway, I have every confidence that we will be subjected to the inevitable array of charges and countercharges that range from dubious to patently untrue.

Even small sins can lead to big evils, according to Stanford Professor of Psychology Philip Zimbardo, the author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. (Zimbardo is famous for creating the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which normal college students randomly selected to serve as “guards” in a simulated prison, became so brutal so quickly that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.)

A speaker at this year’s TED conference in Monterey, CA, Zimbardo presented the “Seven Social Processes that Grease the Slippery Slope of Evil”. They include “blind obedience to authority,” “uncritical conformity to group norms” and “passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference.” Zimbardo concludes that we need to foster a culture of heroism as the antidote to evil.

In its list of professional values for our profession, PRSA lists “honesty” as the #2 value, after “advocacy.” I think “honesty” warrants a promotion to the #1 spot.