In May 2012, three European Academies held a conference on the present and future of microbiology. The conference, entitled “The New Microbiology”, was a joint effort of the French Académie des sciences, of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and of the British Royal Society. The organizers – Pascale Cossart and Philippe Sansonetti from the “Académie des sciences”, David Holden and Richard Moxon from the “Royal Society”, and Jörg Hacker and Jürgen Hesseman from the “Leopoldina Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften” - wanted to highlight the current renaissance in the field of microbiology mostly due to the advent of technological developments and allowing for single-cell analysis, rapid and inexpensive genome-wide comparisons, sophisticated microscopy and quantitative large-scale studies of RNA regulation and proteomics. The conference took place in the historical Palais de l’Institut de France in Paris with the strong support of Jean-François Bach, Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Académie des sciences.