The Hunter-Gatherer Groups at the Heart of a Microbiome Gold Rush
Scientists have been looking for health-promoting microbes in the feces of people from traditional communities—some of whom feel exploited.
December 18, 2023 | Source: MIT Technology Review | by Jessica Hamzelou
We’re all teeming with microbes. We’ve got guts full of them, and they’re crawling all over our skin. These tiny, ancient life forms have evolved with us. And over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important they are to our health and well-being. They help extract nutrients from our food, influence the way our immune systems work, and can even send signals to our brains that play a role in our mental health.
But some researchers believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized, industrialized, and antimicrobial way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.
“It’s very clear in industrialized nations we have lost many species that were probably fundamental to human evolution,” says Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiome scientist at Stanford University. “They’ve just become extinct.” Some have seemingly disappeared before we’ve even had a chance to figure out what they do.