I've finally started Carl Zimmer's Microcosm: E. coli And The New Science Of Life.

I am literally only 12 pages in, yet Zimmer has already managed to make me catch my breath, clutch the book to my chest, and feel my eyes get a little moist from the emotional impact of it all.

 You see, I find the most fascinating, beautiful, awe-inspiring, and spiritually uplifting experiences happen only when one is studying the world around them. This of course includes biology and microbiology, but also chemistry, physics, and even mathematics. Yes, I fall head over heels for scientific discovery.  The study of bacteria happens to be one of my top interests, so picking up and reading Microcosm as soon as I could get my hands on it was a given.
In short, when I read about a young Joshua Lederberg writing "Hooray!" in the margin of his lab notebook when he discovered there truly was some sort of reproduction going on among E. coli, I practically leaped up with a "Hooray!" myself. Of course I already know all about the outcome of Lederberg's experiments along with the work of Tatum and Beadle -- nothing new there -- but it was  the candid recounting of how a simple scientific discovery could produce such pure joy that made me appreciate I was reading about people who think like me: people who know that to truly live is to learn about and discover the world around them.