The Hunter-Gatherer Groups At The Heart Of A Microbiome Gold Rush
janrinok writes:
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.
Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don't live in the polluted, processed, and antimicrobial-laden environment that most of the rest of us share. They've been studying the feces of people from hunter-gatherer societies like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost.
And so the race is on to find those missing microbes. Both academics and companies are building catalogues of microbes seen in hunter-gatherer societies, and attempting to re-create this microbial brew as a treatment for people in industrialized societies. The hope is that with the proper mix of microbes, many people might gain protection from disorders, like depression and metabolic disease, that seem to affect people living in industrialized societies at much higher rates. But there is a rather major catch: we don't know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have healthier" microbiomes-and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others.
At the same time, members of the communities being studied say some projects aren't being done ethically or equitably. Even recent research projects have taken biological samples without consent and attempted to artificially manipulate the way hunter-gatherers eat and live, says Shani Mangola, a member of the much-studied Hadza society in Tanzania. He and others are concerned about the risk of what's called biopiracy-taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones.
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