Field Guide to Bacteria
Dr. BETSEY DEXTER DYER 
Bojan Jennings Professor of Biology
If you spend some time on the Wheaton campus you can expect to meet Dr. Dyer in a myriad of settings. Perhaps you will find her leading her genetics students by example in the love of scientific exploration and discovery. You may overhear her motivating a group of programmers in the Genomics Group to "be creative" and later find her hunched over her bench dissecting a termite. Or you just may notice her next to you in a ballet class or guarding you on the basketball court.
In the introduction to her latest book (A Field Guide to Bacteria), Professor Dyer writes:
"But what I really want to say here is that I've done something far more presumptuous -- and it is something that I recommend you try yourself. My primary goal throughout has been 'bacteriocentricity' -- that is, to put myself in the place of bacteria, to try to experience the world as they exerience it."
We caught up with Dr. Dyer between a genomics research meeting and her next ballet class...
Why a field guide of Bacteria?
When I was in graduate school, I was fortunate to be included on several field trips with field microbiologists to some extreme habitats where bacteria are highly visible to the naked eye. 
I was shown all sorts of techniques and interpretaions for identifying bacteria in the field, sometimes without a microscope. I thought that a field guide to bacteria should be written, compiling all of their techniques so that anyone could use them. I figured one of them would write it. However they didn't, so years later, after I got tenure, I wrote A Field Guide to Bacteria (Cornell University Press, 2003). The book is full of information, so much so that I do not have an instant recall of all of it. Therefore I am glad to have it on my shelf as a reference for quick look-ups.
What are some of the ways people are using your book?
I am pleasantly surprised that so many amateur naturalists have the book and are using it. It is what I had hoped for, that the same folks who have field guides to ferns and fungi and beetles and animal tracks would like this one too. Teachers of microbiology are using the book because it is full of great examples for students. Also professional microbiologists often get focused on just one group of bacteria; they seem to be enjoying the field guide because it reminds them just how wonderfully diverse the bacteria are.
By the way, the fields guide is entirely derivative of other peoples' work. Nothing is original with me. I was just fortunate to have the time to be able to put it together.
You can read an extended article about Dr. Dyer's passion for bacteria here.
We heard you are working on your next book; what is your new project?
I think that termite symbionts are a wonderful model system or model community for understanding the mechanisms by which microbes have speciated. My goal is to make that as clear as possible in the form of a book, the working title of which is "By Their Very Peculiarity". It is from a quotation by J.T. Bonner in Lives of a Biologist:
"By their very peculiarity they made me see other 'normal organisms' in a new light."
What books have you been reading lately
"The Reluctant Empress" by Brigitte Haman (because I came back from a trip to Vienna realizing that I needed to read more of the history of the Austro-Hungarian empire)
"Underwater to get out of the Rain" (an autobiography of marine biologist Trevor Norton)
"A Sense of the World" by Jason Roberts (the true story of a blind traveller)
plus
stacks and stacks of books on speciation and cell evolution including a wonderful book on mitochondria:
"Power,Sex,Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life" by Nick Lane.
Dr. Betsey Dyer's Personal Profile.
Wheaton's Department of Biology.
