Well, *that's* not worrying...

September 6, 2017 10:18 AM

Stanford press release: "A new survey of DNA fragments circulating in human blood suggests our bodies contain vastly more diverse microbes than anyone previously understood. What’s more, the overwhelming majority of those microbes have never been seen before, let alone classified and named..."
posted by aleph (35 comments total)

Humans are just vectors for other organisms.
posted by nikoniko at 10:23 AM on September 6, 2017 [8 favorites]

Minishoggoths.
posted by Artw at 10:29 AM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

Exciting new research reveals that the insides of humans are even grosser than we previously thought!
posted by aubilenon at 10:29 AM on September 6, 2017 [11 favorites]

We've done more or less alright while carrying lots of mystery microbes.

I'm only worried about ill-conceived medical efforts to deal with the "problem".
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:32 AM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

We should recruit them!
posted by Artw at 10:33 AM on September 6, 2017

ill-conceived medical efforts to deal with the "problem"

I propose twice-daily dialysis with a blood pasteurization stage.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 10:37 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

@Nancy Lebovitz, I'm mostly worried about our ignorance about them and their effects with just more medical efforts likely to screw up what we don't understand. And that's wo even *trying* to affect them such as the use of antibiotics to treat infections.
posted by aleph at 10:41 AM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

I propose twice-daily dialysis with a blood pasteurization stage.

Hello? Peter? Peter Thiel? Is that you?
posted by adamgreenfield at 10:42 AM on September 6, 2017 [7 favorites]

Peter Thiel? Is that you?

The V-Symbiotes are sensitive to UV and should not be exposed in this manner.
posted by Artw at 10:44 AM on September 6, 2017 [7 favorites]

Nope, just me here... ol' lonely Bogdanov. Nobody thinks about poor Bogdanov. Capitalist scum get all the credit when I, the greatest Bolshevik who ever lived, was the one who really did the hard work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bogdanov#Later_years_and_death
posted by symbioid at 10:50 AM on September 6, 2017 [10 favorites]

Reminds me of this http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/science/29microbes.html about the abundance of unclassified soil microbes.
posted by borges at 10:55 AM on September 6, 2017

Somewhere in that mess is the bacterium that produced some chemical that lets us think.

What if it goes away?

We're just Lego organisms, assembled from a whole lot of disparate parts.
posted by hank at 11:10 AM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

We're just Lego organisms, assembled from a whole lot of disparate parts.

And a good 20 percent of it is some janky STAK-EM-UP BLOKS we got at a flea market.
posted by Etrigan at 11:18 AM on September 6, 2017 [9 favorites]

Look, if it's good enough for NPM it's good enough for us.
posted by Artw at 11:24 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Oh Lord, I didn't realize *how* ignorant we are. Bacterial seem to communicate electrically as well as send chemical signals to each other.
posted by aleph at 11:27 AM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

MeTa
posted by lalochezia at 11:36 AM on September 6, 2017

Minishoggoths mishegoss.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:53 AM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

You are loaded with filth.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 12:14 PM on September 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

A description from a century ago of an exhibit by the U.S. government's Bureau of Standards at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition:

It has been declared that the science of tomorrow will have to be largely based upon investigations that carry the investigator beyond the sixth decimal point; in other words, that the future science will have to be based upon an adaption of scientific fact to human need, even if it involves the measurement of a millionth of an inch, the millionth part of an ounce or the millionth part of a degree of temperature.

So bright and optimistic, but little did they know of the horrors that awaited us down there beyond the sixth decimal point. We're like the dwarves who delved too deep and unleashed horrors.
posted by XMLicious at 12:44 PM on September 6, 2017 [4 favorites]

It's not horrors, it's us. It's been us since there ever was an us. We're just getting better at understanding the dizzying array of life that is us. I bet in 50 years people will look back at the age of antibiotics the way we now look back at drinking radium water for health.
posted by jetsetsc at 12:58 PM on September 6, 2017 [6 favorites]

It's not horrors, it's us.

Exactly my feelings on it. My first reaction was "cool!" Seems it should represent a fantastically interesting avenue of research if it pans out.

I can't fathom reading a press-release claiming our biology is a bit more complicated than we'd thought, and getting worked up over it.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 1:08 PM on September 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

We are colonies.
posted by Artw at 1:47 PM on September 6, 2017

We are colonies where parts eat other parts. Working that out could be tricky.
posted by aleph at 2:05 PM on September 6, 2017

Maybe Stanford just isn't that popular, and other schools know a lot more bacteria and viruses; maybe it's your breath, Stanford. Well, or maybe you just didn't know what a big and filthy world you have inside you. The breath mints, the Summer's Eve, not gonna help...
posted by Oyéah at 2:28 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

I bet in 50 years people will look back at the age of antibiotics the way we now look back at drinking radium water for health.

I was with you up until this last bit -- there was never any sort of scientific basis for the popularity of radium water. As a matter of fact, it's textbook "energy" woo.

But antibiotics have saved a hell of a lot of lives. I think it's a serious disservice to conflate these two things.
posted by tclark at 3:10 PM on September 6, 2017 [7 favorites]

antibiotics have saved a hell of a lot of lives. I think it's a serious disservice to conflate these two things.

Yeah. Maybe more like the era of surgeries when they were using ether as anesthesia. They did what they had to at the time, but you wouldn't want to go back there.
posted by saturday_morning at 3:33 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

We are colonies and syphilis is still a thing you don't want.
posted by Artw at 3:35 PM on September 6, 2017 [5 favorites]

saturday_morning, have you seen the BBC show "Quacks"?
posted by lapolla at 4:43 PM on September 6, 2017

Yesterday I watched Hank Green read the first chapter of his new book, Turtles all the way down... it was oddly prophetic, as he spent a lot of time talking about how we're less than 1/2 human cells.
posted by MikeWarot at 4:59 PM on September 6, 2017

We are a multitude. We are living beings that have drunk and eaten and breathed other living beings every day of our lives and for multiple generations beyond. It's no wonder we have evolved to get along fine with most of them. Some, though, will always be unwelcome visitors.
posted by DaddyNewt at 6:58 PM on September 6, 2017

Yeah, like those mitochondrial bastards!
posted by bigbigdog at 10:08 PM on September 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

It is still so amazing to me to find out how much we just don't KNOW about all kinds of things. It's like astronomers discovering black holes, quasars, other cool objects...and then they come to the realization that there's 95% of energy and matter in the universe that we didn't even know was there. It's stunning and humbling. There is a whole lot, maybe most stuff, that modern medicine doesn't know or know about yet. So yay science!
posted by Rufous-headed Towhee heehee at 1:08 AM on September 7, 2017

People are made of Soylent Greenococcus!

Speaking of unseen worlds that modern medicine knows nothing of, though there isn't yet any evidence so concrete as DNA fragments: the concept of the shadow biosphere might be of interest. Maybe the DNA fragments mentioned in the OP still leave out 95% of the organisms present within the average human body.
posted by XMLicious at 1:42 AM on September 7, 2017

For those interested in going deeper than press releases, Ed Yong's extremely well-sourced book I Contain Multitudes explores in depth the idea that what we think of as an "individual" organism is really a collective made substantially of microbes. Yong can write, and genuinely knows his stuff. (Guardian and NYT reviews.)
posted by informavore at 5:11 AM on September 7, 2017 [2 favorites]

Maybe Stanford just isn't that popular... maybe it's your breath, Stanford.

Read this while brushing my teeth. It triggered a strange mix of emotions...
posted by stanf at 1:54 PM on September 7, 2017 [1 favorite]