Over the years, as I’ve learned about the microbes that help keep us healthy, some of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about the microbiome have been with Martin Blaser. He’s a microbiologist at the New York School of Medicine, where he and his colleagues have found tantalizing links between the diversity of microbes in people’s bodies and medical conditions ranging from asthma to obesity. While those results are preliminary, they’ve led Blaser to worry about the long-term consequences of our torrid love affair with antibiotics. As we overdose on antibiotics to kill bad germs, we may be driving some good germs extinct.

In the latest issue of Wired, I interview Blaser about his work. And if you want to find out more, his new book, Missing Microbes, has just been published. It’s an excellent look at one of the most intriguing fields of biology today.

“In Moby-Dick, the cabin-boy Pip falls out of the ship and sinks deep in the ocean (emphasis mine):

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

Continue reading “Why Is the Blog Called “The Loom”?” →

I’ll be taking the week off from blogging. Let me leave you with an hour-long interview on public radio in Charlotte, NC, which was recorded on Friday when I was in town to give a lecture for the North Carolina State Science Festival. We ranged over a lot of material, from de-extinctions to science literacy to personalized medicine and more. See you next week! Continue reading “From Microbiomes to Neanderthals” →