Remember my post on culture?Looks like the "stool donor" approach is getting some traction -- Dr. Gordon is Director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, talking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air a couple weeks back about doing exactly that:
Dr. GORDON: Well, in this particular case, a fecal community was transplanted into a diseased individual's gut and there was a beneficial effect observed over time, reflected in improvement of their symptoms. ...I still think someday it will be more common for doctors to administer bacteria cultures than anti-biotics.
GROSS: I guess one of the things I find so interesting about this fecal transplant is one, its a fecal transplant. It's so odd to think of using in this case, a spouse's feces or the community of microorganisms in those feces to transplant into the ill person's gut. Its a way of transplanting good guy bacteria instead of using antibiotics to just kill the bad guy bacteria and in the process, kill the good guy bacteria too.
Also interesting from this interview is that 90 percent of the cells we carry around aren't actually human -- but bacterial and other non-human microbes. By count, we're ~10x more bacterial than human. Surprising, hard to believe, but also very interesting.
Having politicians kiss your babies? Maybe a good way to get healthy/successful peoples' bacteria on your kids.
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