There really is something going on with those bastardteria and the gut biome . . . NO hunter-gatherers have even HEARD of an auto-immune disease, let alone had one. It's all diet, diet diet and feeding that ravenous horde of symbionts that own US—we don't own THEM.
Some scientists have compared animals like us as actually being living hives, sharing our living space—no, being PART of the same living space, as fucking microbes. They ARE us, they outnumber our human cells TEN TO FUCKING ONE. We're not even human, we're MOSTLY MICROBIAL.
And god help you if they ever get pissed off.
Two people whom I love are in dire straits as I type, and I put the blame squarely on the microbiome because they're both suffering from serious, disabling auto-immune diseases.
The microbiome goes silently about its business but I compare them to a vast symphony orchestra who plays tunes with the instruments you give them. And curse you if you give them old, broken instruments . . . the result is not going to be nice to hear. If they somehow had a Union, its head would be a very angry Jimmy Hoffa. (J. Hoffanensia?)
Hark to the words of this guy, who wrote an entire book about some other little folk in whose goings-on we should be veriverrrryy interested—parasites.
It's very hard explaining to the masses why this whole microbiome thing has exploded onto the world—even I had no idea until recently—but I'll try to explain it in simple terms, which is the way I came to understand it:
Up until fairly recently, we could only examine bacteria in any detail when we could make cultures of them in the lab. This limited us immensely, since the vast majority—something like 99%—are not able to be cultured outside the environment in which they operate normally; i.e. the gut).
But scientists have been given an amazing tool—DNA sequencing—which enables them to bypass cultivation and go directly to seeing all the DNA information about these bacteria. The sequencing involved requires a lot of computing power, but recently that has become much less expensive, so more people can afford to study bacteria, so more bacteria have become studied, and so on and so on.
So basically, technology has opened this vast door from behind which had hidden all these incredible, invisible secrets that are only just now revealing themselves. It's kind of like a blind man gradually beginning to be able to see colours. ("Oh, so THIS is the red everyone's been talking about!" ["This is what's causing us to all get sick!" in the case of the microbiome])
It's what enables humble old me to get my gut contents analyzed by some lab for $99. It's what enabled me, a couple of years ago, to get my DNA sequenced (and that of my son and my mother).
It's fascinating and sobering what technology can do today—but also very scary to realize that it is perhaps not we at all who are controlling our own destinies, and that we should really take a hard look at how our presence here on earth is actually part of a vast cooperative effort on many more lifeforms that have been around for billions of years longer than us, that they are actually the ones piloting our ship, not us, by a long shot, and that we're going to have to be very, very mindful of that fact if we want to coexist with them peacefully and not come to grief.
I am fiercely at work trying, in this late stage in life, to get to know these overlords and try to make peace with them before they decide that they've had enough of me and my blundering ways and start to wander off to occupy a more obliging and cooperative host.
No comments:
Post a Comment