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This Valentine’s Day, as you bask in the beauty of your beloved, don’t just thank his or her genes and your good fortune; thank microbes. Research on the microbes that inhabit our bodies has progressed rapidly in recent years. Scientists think that these communities, most of which live in the gut, shape our health in myriad ways, affecting our vulnerability to allergic diseases like hay fever, how much weight we put

One day in February 2009, a 13-year-old boy named Sasha Egger started thinking that people were coming to hurt his family. His mother, Helen, watched with mounting panic that evening as her previously healthy son forgot the rules to Uno, his favorite card game, while playing it. She began making frantic phone calls the next morning. By then, Sasha was shuffling aimlessly around the yard, shredding paper and stuffing

When Vik was in his late 20s, blood started appearing in his stool. He found himself rushing to the bathroom as many as nine times a day, and he quit his job at a software company. He received a diagnosis of severe ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory condition of the colon. Steroids, which suppress inflammation, didn’t work for him. Sulfasalazine suppositories offered only the slightest relief. A year and a half afte

I have a piece in the NYT Mag on the community of people who self-treat with parasites. They operate almost entirely outside of any regulatory or medical oversight. This is a story about desperate people trying to cure themselves with an unproven therapy. It’s not a story about whether the therapy works. We don’t know if it does. And in fact, there’s good evidence, in the form of double-blinded placebo-controlled stu

In the 1990s, scientist Ivan Casas traveled to the Peruvian Andes in search of human microbes. Casas was head of research for a Swedish probiotics company called BioGaia. He believed that mammals, including people, passed beneficial microbes to their young via breast milk. But he’d been unable to isolate one species he thought should be there (Lactobacillus reuteri) in breast milk from women in the US or urban areas

Some of the disparity in the risk from BRCA mutations is generational. One repeated finding is that, by age 50, mutation carriers born in the early twentieth century seem to have a lower risk of cancer than those born later3. The pattern suggests that outside influences interact with genes, and that something in the environment has changed in an unfavourable way. If researchers can figure out what those influences ar

For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands. A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers,

I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review exploring the question: Should we bank our own stool for microbial reconstitution? A few notes and interesting tidbits that didn’t make it into the piece. First, an interesting study linking early-life microbial disturbances with the later development of asthma was just published in Science Translational Medicine. Unlike other studies, which look backward in time to make

Last year, asmy wife and I prepared for the arrival of our second child, I began to worry. My wife is a mid-level manager at an advertising agency with offices around the world. She heads a team, and she’s ferociously dedicated to her work—which translated, late in her pregnancy, to a couple of 80-hour weeks and chronic sleep deprivation. When she came home from work at 2 a.m. for the second time in as many weeks, I

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