I love to think about the Microbiome. That invisible sea of bacteria and other microorganisms that are taking a ride in your stomach, coating your skin, or bathing some niche environment.
I wrote a long time ago about my speculation that survivors of our American Civil War may have had enhanced immune systems due to the exposures they had during the war: https://atresfreq.blogspot.com/2007/06/civil-war-immunity.html
I also listen to Science Friday each week and it is one of their favorite subjects. They mostly think about how the diminishing cost to sequence a genome, coupled with the ability to edit genes is bringing about a revolution in genetic engineering. Then they often muse on the fact that scientist keep finding very interesting organisms living on other organisms. They like the human gut biome, and one of the most fascinating stories about this is the discovery of fecal transplants as a way to reverse severe C. difficile infections in hospital patients. That's a whole different story, one that is delightfully disgusting and amazingly instructive.
The common theme here is that a genetic diversity and a community of organisms can get in sync and have mutually beneficial effects on each other. The overuse of antibiotics, kind of a micro organism scorched earth policy, leaves a barren microbial landscape making it easy for pathogens to take root without interference. There is a lot of speculation about how this works. Some research has shown that microbial communities sometimes are in competition for resources and produce chemicals that tend to kill or limit pathogens. Some scientists speculate that it's just a numbers game. In a sea of bacteria, no one strain can dominate.
I listened to a podcast during my run today call SGU. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Their whole spiel is that you have to be skeptical about all knowledge, question the basis for any belief, and only trust ideas with a great deal of support information. They make fun of people that they believe are misguided. They have particular fun with groups of people that they feel are willfully ignorant or self-deceived about their beliefs. I have to admit that I usually enjoy their derogatory banter, but occasionally I dream up dialogues in my head where I disagree with someone, but respect their right to be completely full of shit. OK, I admit I have a tolerant streak that is also condescending and self-congratulatory. It's partly borne of the belief that people aren't going to change their minds, so it's no use trying to "educate" someone. But it's also rooted in the knowledge that people nest in the beliefs they are comfortable in, and assaulting a person's belief system is rude and unwelcome.
The podcast I was listening to today talked about this company offering "natural" or "raw" water. It's $27 for a 2½ gallon container. They warn their customers to drink it within "one lunar cycle" or it will turn green. The podcasters were having a blast making fun of the "hippies" that believe in this. They kept talking about how these people were drinking disease water and believing they were being more pure or healthy. At one point, one of the cast said something about how spring water was polluted with trash, toxins, or arsenic. At that point, I kind of got the sense that these people were going a bit too far. My understanding is that spring water is hard water, laden with minerals, but almost always bacteria or microorganism free. Now I'm not going to claim it's toxin free, as arsenic is actually a good example of a mineral that can leach into ground water. But Arsenic, like most toxins, is not a universal poison. It has to be ingested at a particular concentration in order to be lethal. People are consuming toxins all the time at sub-lethal doses. Nicotine is a poison that could kill you in one dose, but that would be something like 100 cigarettes worth taken all at once in order to be fatal. So maybe spring water is not absolutely pure, but I would never hesitate to drink it fresh from the source. I'm thinking of the giant springs in Missouri that recharge over hundreds of square miles and emerge from deep in the earth. I don't know that I would drink out of a little sprout of water in the middle of a cow field, that might not be what I consider a spring. I used to sell filters to a company that captured spring water from some big spring in Missouri. They filtered the heck out of that water before bottling it. They had a parallel operation that did the exact same filtration regime on Kansas City Tap water and bottled it. One they sold as Spring Water, the other they sold as Purified Water. I think they needed to filter the Spring Water in that case because the transport trucks could be a source of contamination. If I was at the spring, I'd drink the water right out of the ground and believe myself to be drinking something that could not hurt me.
I started thinking about the gimmick of "Raw Water" they were making fun of and realized that it could be possible that someone could deliver a water with some bacteria in it that was very healthy for you. Just like the Raw Milk trend among some people. Food Safety Fanatics believe this is pure insanity. Let's put it in perspective. People drank unpasteurized milk for centuries. Some got sick occasionally, but it was mostly an acceptable risk. People found ways around the risk by fermenting or processing it into cheese or other products. If we had high tech high speed instruments capable of seeing every microbe and cataloging it in a container, we could simply test and pass or fail raw products that in reality are full of stray microorganisms. You might also simply test the health of the cows (or goats or whatever you're milking) and keep the collection and bottling highly cleaned and be assured that this was a low risk. Society might trend that way in the future. I don't think it's completely insane to use raw products, it's just riskier than pasteurized products. Who knows what kind of microorganisms we are missing out on by sterilizing everything. Or, to be fair, who knows how many diseases we are dodging on a daily basis by insisting on high standards of sterility.
I work with a customer that grows a bacterium that I believe was discovered in a cow's stomach originally. They figured out how to grow it in large quantities (no simple feat in itself) and sell it to the cattlemen's industry as a food supplement. It allows cows to go instantly from pasture to feed lot for fattening. Cows actually have multiple stomaches and one of them has the function of housing bacteria that do a great deal of the work of digestion. If a cow eats grass over a long period of time, that stomach has a population of bacteria that are perfectly suited to break down grass. When a cow is in a feed lot for a long time, they eventually have a completely different population of gut bacteria. The transition from grass to feed lot rations makes a cow sick. They have to do it gradually, over a 30 day period in order to keep the cow from getting too sick. Once converted over, the cow's digestive system loves the feed rations and gains weight rapidly. The product my customer makes switches over their gut microbes instantly and allows cattle to go directly to full rations without getting sick. It's probably not a perfect fit to call it a Probiotic. I think of a Probiotic as a microorganism that provides a benefit. This microbe doesn't just provide a benefit, it serves a crucial function. I think we stamp microorganisms as probiotics with a connotation that this is a nice thing to have, but you can live without it. It's just a benefit, not a requirement. Any organism that does digestion for the host animal isn't just a nice thing to have, it's almost like an organ, you can't live without it. I'm guessing that since there are probably multiple strains that perform digestion that this is a bit of an exaggeration.
I love this field because we stand in the glaring ignorance of all that could be going on all around us every day. It's a whole gigantic uncharted territory to explore. Imagine the fascinating things we'll discover when we start mining this knowledge. It's one of those things that people 100 years from now will look at us in disdain because we were so stupid not to know it. But we live in this sea of invisible information all around us, doing what it does despite our oblivion to it. The universe doesn't care how clueless we are, it still is what it is. It's also kind of like ghosts. If ghosts were real, wouldn't that be wild? They'd be all around us and we wouldn't have any idea they were there. Except for the occasional poltergeist. The microbial poltergeists are how we learn that there is something there to know. Someone performs the first fecal transplant and suddenly we realize that things don't work exactly as we had always imagined.
As I finished my run, I walked down my driveway and looked at the dead fountain grass tufts up by the road under the walnut trees. For the hundredth time, I thought about trying to grow something to screen the road from my house (I should say my house from the road). When we first moved in, the builders had planted pine trees in a line across the front yard. Great idea, but they died after about 3 or 4 years. We understood that the walnuts were to blame. Nothing grows well under walnuts. I heard from a nurseryman a long time ago that the walnuts secrete a toxin. Over the years I've tried to learn what it is that they secrete and if there is any way to counter it. I thought about separating my fountain grass out to divide an propogate it to make a wall of decorative grass. The same grass grows taller in other places where it's not under the walnuts. I thought about planting it with a huge dollop of bone meal to give it a good head start. Then I thought about giving it a good pocket of compost to root into. I speculate that one of composts benefits is to bring along a healthy microbiome with it. Then I realized something. Maybe the walnut trees have their own probiotics. Maybe what is going on here is a symbiotic microorganism that secretes chemicals that are toxic to most plants, but harmless to walnut trees. This would mean that the walnut trees would not have to compete for nutrients. It would tend to keep the area under a walnut grove free of competitive trees and shrubs. It would also mean that any attempts to plant shrubs, bushes, or other trees near the walnuts would work well for a few years, until the organism invaded the root area of the new plantings and pinched them off. That could be what happened to the pine trees so many years ago. They looked fine for the first year, then slowed down growth in the 2nd & 3rd year, then turned brown and died after that.
We'll know all about this one day. There will be ways to survey and map out what's going on in the soil, on the surfaces of all the plants and animals, in the air, in the water. We'll be able to know what we want to know about these invisible populations. But for now, they are just invisible silent ghosts, doing their thing with us oblivious to their secrets.
