Thursday, November 10, 2011

Our personal microbes

Now it is all over that a human body plays host to a trillion or so microbes; the plurality are workers in the gut and digestive tract; recently it has become widely known that differently mixed multitudes colonize skin areas,  the armpit populations contains both different tribes and close-cousins of the elbow and wrist citizenries; the number of microbes in a human may be 10 times the number of human cells.

Trees also have distinctive entourages, fungii, insects and microbes, the term used is 'symbiotic community'.

It took a good billion years or two or three to build up this kind of natural organization, that is a very long time, and it went slow, evolution got bored and came up with crazy designs, freaks of nature like hummingbirds, humans and humpbacks, one of which now can manipulate genetics and do in a generation what once took ages or was impossible.  Maybe they can customize personal microbes, surely for a price; to make your skin glow and your smell attract, the demand will come from the same people who now botox and niptuck.

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