I generally think the microbiome has been overblown. It’s an incredibly appealing target for modern-day drug hunters: millions of species hiding within our guts! Nobody knows which one is the best or what they do! They can all interact with each other! Let’s screen a thousand people, get the genomes of a million bacteria, functionally screen all of them and their interactions, and test them all in high tech “organs on chips”! It’s like the modern day version of exploring the deepest recesses of the rainforest for drugs, but, instead of being brave explorers in the Amazon, we’re whitecoats in Cambridge looking at strangers’ poop!
Thank you for this fascinating post and for your thoughts on the paper- much appreciated! :)