We Are All Microbe

Most of us probably think we're products of our parents and their parents and their parents' parents. That's certainly true, but their collective contributions are outnumbered 10:1 (100 trillion vs 10 trillion cells) by our microbiome. The Economist cover story from this week highlights the latest thinking around the microbiome and it's implications for science and medicine. They even mention that a "handful of doctors" use fecal transplants to treat C. difficile since transplanting a microbiome is easier than transplanting a kidney. Mike is one of the handful of those doctors. (note: Maryn McKenna's comment on Mike's post from 2 years ago is still one of my favorite) One of the more interesting paragraphs covers the potential use of antibiotics to positively manipulate the microbiome:

"One is more sophisticated deployment of the humble antibiotic, arguably the pharma industry’s most effective invention. At the moment antibiotics are used mainly to kill infections. In the future they might have a more subtle use—to manipulate the mix of bugs within a human, so that good bugs spread at the expense of bad ones."


Part 2: "The human microbiome: Me myself, us" goes into the significance of the microbiome in greater detail.