In 2008, Dr. Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. Khoruts said.
Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria.
Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since. [...]
Resident microbes and human identity is definitely a fascinating topic. If we were to define biological identity strictly by the number of cells making up an organism, we would be more bacteria than human:
ReplyDelete"It has been estimated that the microbes in our bodies collectively make up to 100 trillion cells, tenfold the number of human cells, and suggested that they encode 100-fold more unique genes than our own genome." (From Qin J. et al., "A human gut microbial gene catalogue established by metagenomic sequencing," Nature 464:59-65, March 2010.)