Working at a hospital as a laboratory technician, I had a friend who led weekly meetings between physicians and medical staff on the recent clinical microbiology cases in the hospital. I was invited to observe and marveled at the microbes cultured from patients, which evoked microbes I had studied during my master’s degree – the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Though the setting was clinical, rather than basic science, the techniques referred to, such as sequencing and mass spectrometry, were all familiar. Coming from that exposure to the world of clinical microbiology, I hoped to find a way to transfer all the tools and ideas of modern microbial basic science, such as the cutting-edge System Biology work done in the Barkai lab, and other labs in the cell2cell network. By combining mathematical modeling, molecular profiling, imaging, and other techniques, especially data visualization, clinical microbiology may experience growth that benefits the microbes’ hosts – us.