The Microbiome Never Ceases to Amaze

While I was away last week on vacation, the New York Times published my feature on the hidden jungle that each of us carries, known as the microbiome. I was very happy to come home to a lot of kind notes, tweets, and various communications about it. Yet I would never claim that my article delivered the Big Scoop on the subject. After all, we've known about the microbiome ever since Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek scraped his teeth over 300 years ago and discovered wee animacules in the scum. And as I wrote in my book Microcosm, Theodor Escherich discovered his eponymous Escherichia coli over a century ago in a quest to catalog the good microbes in babies's guts, hoping to thereby identify the ones that were killing the children in droves. Even in the age of molecular biology, the microbiome has been well-chronicled. Jessica Snyder Sachs wrote a book back in 2007 calledGood Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World that I heartily endorsed (and still do). So why write a story now? That's a question that science writers have to ponder a lot. Much of the most interesting science does not explode with a single experiment or the unearthing of a single fossil. It's a stately unfolding, a long-running collaboration/competition. For me, the time seemed ripe thanks to a couple recent papers that catalogued vast amounts of DNA in the collective genome of our microbial lodgers. Scientists have long known that the genes in the microbiome outnumber human genes by perhaps 10 or 100 to 1. But now we're finally getting a database of that genomic richness. And then, at a recent conference, I heard about a fecal transplant that saved a woman's life. I knew I had my lede. But I called my editor to make sure that I could kick off the article that way, given that so many readers peruse the Times over breakfast. You never know. To anyone who experienced a fascinated nausea, my apologies. In the days since my article came out, a series of new papers on the microbiome have been published. Today the Times published an editorial about one of them, a study of the incredible diversity of bacteria-infecting viruses we carry. Even identical twins harbor different sets of viruses. And yesterday, Caltech researchers described how multiple sclerosis may be the result of the way bacteria manage our immune systems. Still, I'm glad I didn't wait for all the good science to emerge. I would still be waiting 20 years from now. PS--Here is a list of links for my Times article: The fecal transplant paperGenomes of the microbiomesA catalog of 3.3 million genesBacteria teaching the immune systemThe paper on how microbes infect us at birthThe microbes of the lungs [Image: A beautiful bacterial colony]