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Acknowledgments

AS THE SOLE LISTED AUTHOR OF THIS TEXT, I would be negligent if I did not make it absolutely clear that it is the result of a community effort on many levels. The folks listed below all deserve the lion’s share of the credit for this work; any errors and shortcoming I claim only for myself.

This book was initiated over the course of a couple of years by the persistent encouragement of Greg Payne at the ASM Press. Once started, Ken April, Production Manager, and John Bell, Senior Production Editor, at the ASM Press made this book happen. Special thanks are also owed to the book’s interior and cover designer, Susan Brown Schmidler; Dianna Logan and Peggy Rupp at Dedicated Book Services, Clarinda, Iowa, who assembled this high-quality book from a collection of text files and images; Lindsay Williams, the diligent ASM Press Editorial and Rights Coordinator, who shepherded permissions; and the art renderer, Tom Webster of Lineworks, Inc., who created professional illustrations from what were, in some cases, little more than vague sketches.

This text is based on a course I was hired (in part) to develop and teach in the Department of Microbiology at North Carolina State University. The success of this course is owed to those who recognized its importance before my arrival and encouraged and fostered its development afterwards—especially Leo Parks, Hosni Hassan, and Gerry Luginbuhl, but also the entire faculty of the department.

This book, and the phylogenetic perspective on which it is based, owes everything to Carl Woese, the intellectual father of modern microbiology. The course on which this text is based has its origin not just in Carl’s work generally but also very specifically in his fabulously important review article from 1987 (Woese CR. 1987. Bacterial evolution. Microbiol Rev 51:221–271). The importance and utility of the phylogenetic perspective have no better advocate than my postdoctoral mentor, Norm Pace, for whom no amount of thanks can suffice for his mentorship over the years.

Enormous credit goes to those who captured the images of organisms used in this text. A picture is worth at least a thousand words. Photo credits are given with the images, but special thanks are warranted to a few who provided numerous images well beyond anything for which I had the right to ask: Michael Thomm and Reinhard Rachel, John Fuerst and Margaret Lindsay, and D. J. Patterson. A special thanks also goes to Howard Spero for allowing us to use his spectacular image of G. bulloides on the cover of this text.

This book also owes its existence to another James W. Brown, my father, for his patient yet persistent encouragement, and to my mother, Phyllis Brown, who nurtured my scientific interests from the earliest possible age. Finally, and most importantly, I am forever grateful for the encouragement and patience of my wife, colleague, and collaborator, Melanie Lee-Brown.