In the October 22 edition of The New Yorker, Michael Specter wrote a fascinating article about the growing and exciting science of the human microbiome, the ecosystem of ten thousand or so bacterial species that call each of our bodies home. The hype around this particular field of scientific and medical inquiry is intense: Specter quotes David Relman of Stanford Medical school as saying that right now we are in the “beautiful, euphoric, heady early period” of the field, and notes that each week seems to bring additional symposia, publications, and grants for new research. All of this is for good reason. Promising studies have indicated that microbial therapy (the intentional introduction of certain bacteria into the body) can be an effective treatment for some diseases, while other researchers have suggested that a variety of modern diseases (like asthma, inflammatory-bowel disease, and some allergies) may be tied to changes in the human bacterial ecosystem. In some ways, this isn’t news: as Dr. Douglas Archer noted in an FDA advisory committee meeting on probiotics over a decade ago, using food with live cultures to treat disease is a longstanding practice dating at least as far back as 76 BC, when the Roman historian Plinio advocated using fermented milk to treat GI infections. Read More