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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

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

Eugene Rosenberg, a coral microbiologist, ran into a rather large problem in the early 2000s. While working at the University of Tel Aviv in Israel, he discovered that he couldn’t replicate his own breakthrough findings from a decade earlier. What seemed like a potentially devastating failure at the time would lead Rosenberg to a new way of thinking about evolution. In the 1990s, he’d discovered a driver of coral dis