Nano Nannies
The New York Times has an excellent write up of the new article "Human Milk Glycobiome and its Impact on the Infant Gastrointestinal Microbiota" in today's Science section. Two profoundly important points are made both by the write up and the article; they are (1) that we are each individually a "we", an emergent organism dependent upon billions of organisms within us to promote and to maintain good health; and, (2) just because we don't know what something does that doesn't mean it does nothing - it just means we haven't thought about it hard enough.
It turns out that mother's milk nourishes not only her baby it also selectively recruits and thereafter employs (with payment made in special milk sugars that baby can't digest) billions of tiny bacteria which earn their keep by aiding digestion, protecting epithelial cells and assisting the immune system in its never ending war against pathogens. And what of the other forms of milk sugars whose purposes have yet to be elucidated? The search for whatever they're feeding is now on in earnest.
As for the now refuted claim that the indigestible (at least by baby) milk sugars serve no purpose it's important to recognize just how many such claims are falling these days. It was a big deal three years ago when the ENCODE researchers announced "You know those non-coding DNA segments? You know, the flotsam and jetsam of millions of years of evolution that doesn't really do anything? Well, guess what?" These days stories about aspects of our selves once thought to be vestigial shadows of distant ancestors turning out instead to be critical determinants of health are common. As a result, we live in a time of great promise but also of great uncertainty.
So what does this have to do with mass torts? First, there's the issue of causality. The task of unraveling causation becomes fantastically complex once we understand the role that genetics, epigenetics, diet and social interactions, including swapping bacteria, play in disease. Second, there's the matter of what bacteria we host unconsciously due to the food that we eat and the impact on our health of the bacteria we will consciously choose to populate our bodies when we consume probiotics. So far the news on probiotics is quite promising but it must always be borne in mind that we are at the beginning of a great revolution whereby we come to understand ourselves as superorganisms and the complex interactions of genetics, epigenetics, diet, social networks and environment (and all that entails, known, unknown and unknown unknowns) that make us what we are. As with most revolutions, because of the uncertainty they bring, it's best to expect the unexpected.
