When asking someone about the importance of soil you receive answers like: It allows plants to grow into beautiful landscapes. It supplies food crops with the necessary nutrients needed for growth. It can support buildings.
It stores immense amounts of carbon to mitigate climate change. However, soil's importance in advancing medicine and fighting illnesses is often overlooked. Most of the antibiotics used to fight illness today were derived from soil microbes, which use those compounds to compete for resources and survival.
Soil contains the most diverse and complex microbiome on Earth and links soil, plants and human health. Soil microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, and archaea) represent the largest fraction of biomass on Earth. A teaspoon of productive soil can contain anywhere between 100 million and 1 billion individual microorganisms.
There can be over 50,000 different species in one gram of soil, along with a billion virus particles. Thus, we can think about soil as a foundational piece to the health of human beings. Penicillin was the first antibiotic to be discovered and developed, which marked a turning point in modern human medicine.
The story goes that in 1928, bacteriologist Dr. Alexander Flemming returned from a summer vacation to his lab at St. Mary's Hospital.
He went to examine petri dishes that had colonies of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that causes staph infections, to find they had been contaminated with the soilborn mold Penicillium notatu.
