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In the mid-2000s Harry Sokol, a gastroenterologist at Saint Antoine Hospital in Paris, was surprised by what he found when he ran some laboratory tests on tissue samples from his patients with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory disorder of the gut. The exact cause of inflammatory bowel disease remains a mystery. Some have argued that it results from a hidden infection; others suspect a proliferation of cer

IN THE SUMMER OF 2010, Ben Blackwell, a five-year-old living near Dublin, Ireland, began complaining of headaches and a squealing noise in his head. And even though he’d stopped taking naps three years earlier, he now randomly fell asleep—while watching television, reading a book, sitting in the car. When Ben’s parents, James and Natalie, succeeded in rousing him, he often snarled at them and seemed terrified. But a