My life as a guinea pig for science

Reporting from the frontline often involves putting yourself under the microscopeJeroen Raes is a man with a lot of poo on his hands. He can't get enough of the stuff and has Petri dishes full of it, from people over the world, piling up in his laboratory's fridges. Let me cut off any rash assumptions you might be making right now – Raes is a leader in the study of the human microbiome, the trillions of microbes that live on (and in) our bodies that, as scientists have discovered over the past decade, we cannot do without.Around 90% of the cells in a typical body are not human, they're micro-organisms. Scientists have found more that 8 million genes in total in the tiny life-forms that live on the human body, which compares with just 21,000 in our own cells. Most of these microbes are harmless, but we would become quickly unhealthy or ill without many others, which help us digest food and fight off infections from pathogens.Raes is among a band of scientists intent on building a reference database of the microbes found in different people, in different parts of the body and in different places in the world. He collects samples from volunteers who swab their mouths, noses and genitals. To get at the most interesting and largest number of microbes, those found in the gut, he needs faeces. As he took me around his lab at VIB University in Brussels, Raes explained that samples of poo would one day become a routine diagnostic tool for doctors, in the way blood or urine samples a...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Psychology Biology Microbiology Neuroscience Features The Observer Source Type: news