We humans have always been very concerned about the health of our bodies, but we haven't always been that good at figuring out what's important. Take the ancient Egyptians, for example: very concerned about the body parts they thought they'd need in the afterlife, but they left some parts out. This part, for example. Although they very carefully preserved the stomach, the lungs, the liver, and so forth, they just mushed up the brain, drained it out through the nose, and threw it away, which makes sense, really, because what does a brain do for us anyway? But imagine if there were a kind of neglected organ in our bodies that weighed just as much as the brain and in some ways was just as important to who we are, but we knew so little about and treated with such disregard. And imagine if, through new scientific advances, we were just beginning to understand its importance to how we think of ourselves. Wouldn't you want to know more about it?
我们人类一直都关注着身体健康, 但却并未找到其中的关键之处。 拿古埃及人举个例子: 他们非常关注身体的各部分, 认为在来生会用到, 但是他们却忽略了一些部位。 比如这个部分。 尽管他们非常小心地保存着胃,肺, 肝,等等, 但是他们会把大脑搅成糊 然后从鼻子抽出, 然后扔掉, 这其实也符合逻辑, 大脑究竟能为我们做什么呢? 但是请想一下, 如果我们身体里有一个被忽略的器官, 和大脑有着同样的重量, 而且和我们是谁息息相关, 但是我们对它却不甚了解, 也并未重视过它。 想象一下,通过新的科学进步, 我们能够开始去理解它 对于我们如何看待自己的重要性。 你难道不想多了解它一些么?
Well, it turns out that we do have something just like that: our gut, or rather, its microbes. But it's not just the microbes in our gut that are important. Microbes all over our body turn out to be really critical to a whole range of differences that make different people who we are. So for example, have you ever noticed how some people get bitten by mosquitos way more often than others?
结果呢,我们真的有那样的东西, 我们的肠道, 或是说肠道的微生物。 但不只有我们肠道中的 微生物很重要, 遍布我们全身的微生物 对于区分我们和其他人 也有着非常深刻的意义。 举个例子,你有没有发现有些人 比一般人更招蚊子。
It turns out that everyone's anecdotal experience out camping is actually true. For example, I seldom get bitten by mosquitos, but my partner Amanda attracts them in droves, and the reason why is that we have different microbes on our skin that produce different chemicals that the mosquitos detect.
事实上,那些个人野营的 趣闻也证明了这一点。 举个例子,我很少会被蚊子咬, 但是我的爱人阿曼达很招蚊子, 原因是我们的皮肤上 存在着不同的微生物, 会产生不同的能够被蚊子 察觉的化学物质。
Now, microbes are also really important in the field of medicine. So, for example, what microbes you have in your gut determine whether particular painkillers are toxic to your liver. They also determine whether or not other drugs will work for your heart condition. And, if you're a fruit fly, at least, your microbes determine who you want to have sex with. We haven't demonstrated this in humans yet but maybe it's just a matter of time before we find out. (Laughter)
现在,微生物在医学界 也有非常重要的作用。 举个例子,你肠道里微生物的种类 决定了是否某种止痛剂 会对你的肝有毒害作用。 它们同样还决定了其他药物 是否适合你的心脏。 另外,如果你是一只果蝇, 你的微生物还会决定 你愿意和谁发生性关系。 我们还没有在人类身上证明这一点, 不过也许只是时间上的问题。(笑声)
So microbes are performing a huge range of functions. They help us digest our food. They help educate our immune system. They help us resist disease, and they may even be affecting our behavior. So what would a map of all these microbial communities look like? Well, it wouldn't look exactly like this, but it's a helpful guide for understanding biodiversity. Different parts of the world have different landscapes of organisms that are immediately characteristic of one place or another or another. With microbiology, it's kind of the same, although I've got to be honest with you: All the microbes essentially look the same under a microscope. So instead of trying to identify them visually, what we do is we look at their DNA sequences, and in a project called the Human Microbiome Project, NIH funded this $173 million project where hundreds of researchers came together to map out all the A's, T's, G's, and C's, and all of these microbes in the human body. So when we take them together, they look like this. It's a bit more difficult to tell who lives where now, isn't it?
微生物有着非常多的功能。 它们帮助我们消化, 调整免疫系统, 防御疾病, 它们甚至会影响我们的行为。 这些微生物菌落的分布图 会是什么样的呢? 也许分布不会和这个一模一样, 但是对理解生物多样性很有帮助。 世界不同的地方有不同的生物分布, 非常直接的反映了 不同地域的特征。 对于微生物也有类似的分布, 但是我得坦白的说: 显微镜下,所有的微生物都长的一样。 所以我们不去直观地识别它们, 我们会观察它们的 DNA , 在一个叫做“人类微生物工程”的项目中, NIH 为这个项目投资了 1.73 亿美元, 几百名研究者聚集起来 共同绘制出所有 了 A, T, G, C 这些碱基, 以及人体内所有 这些微生物的分布图。 所以当我们把它们放在一起的时候, 看起来是这个样子的。 有点难分辨出哪种微生物 分布在哪里对不对?
What my lab does is develop computational techniques that allow us to take all these terabytes of sequence data and turn them into something that's a bit more useful as a map, and so when we do that with the human microbiome data from 250 healthy volunteers, it looks like this. Each point here represents all the complex microbes in an entire microbial community. See, I told you they basically all look the same. So what we're looking at is each point represents one microbial community from one body site of one healthy volunteer. And so you can see that there's different parts of the map in different colors, almost like separate continents. And what it turns out to be is that those, as the different regions of the body, have very different microbes in them. So what we have is we have the oral community up there in green. Over on the other side, we have the skin community in blue, the vaginal community in purple, and then right down at the bottom, we have the fecal community in brown. And we've just over the last few years found out that the microbes in different parts of the body are amazingly different from one another. So if I look at just one person's microbes in the mouth and in the gut, it turns out that the difference between those two microbial communities is enormous. It's bigger than the difference between the microbes in this reef and the microbes in this prairie. So this is incredible when you think about it. What it means is that a few feet of difference in the human body makes more of a difference to your microbial ecology than hundreds of miles on Earth.
我的实验室做的就是 开发计算机技术, 让我们可以将这些 万亿字节的序列数据 转化成更直观有效的分布图, 当我们从 250 个健康的志愿者那里 取来微生物数据的时候, 这个分布图看上去是这个样子。 每一个点都代表着 一整个微生物菌落中的 所有复杂的微生物。 看,我之前说过它们看上去都一样。 这里每一个点都代表着 一个微生物菌落, 来自一个健康志愿者的 某个身体部位。 所以你能看到图中不同的部分 有不同的颜色, 就像分开的大陆一样。 研究结果显示 不同的身体部位 有着不同的微生物。 我们用绿色标记了 左上角的口腔微生物菌落。 右上角蓝色的是 皮肤上的微生物菌落, 紫色的是阴道内的菌落, 然后在最低下, 棕色的是排泄物中的菌落。 在过去的几年里, 我们发现了不同身体部位之间的 微生物存在巨大差异。 如果我只看同一个人 口腔中和肠道中的微生物, 这两个部位微生物菌落 也有着天壤之别。 这个差别要比珊瑚礁中的微生物 和牧场上的微生物的差别大得多。 所以仔细想一下, 你就会感到不可思议。 这就意味着,人们身体尺寸范围内的 微生物生态的差别 要比地球上数百英里间的差别还大。
And this is not to say that two people look basically the same in the same body habitat, either. So you probably heard that we're pretty much all the same in terms of our human DNA. You're 99.99 percent identical in terms of your human DNA to the person sitting next to you. But that's not true of your gut microbes: you might only share 10 percent similarity with the person sitting next to you in terms of your gut microbes. So that's as different as the bacteria on this prairie and the bacteria in this forest.
这也不是说在同一身体部位 两个人的菌落就看上去基本一样。 也许你已经听说 我们人类的 DNA 几乎完全相同。 就 DNA 而言,你和你旁边坐着的人 有99%的相似度。 但是对于你肠道中的微生物就不同了: 就肠胃中的微生物而言, 你和你旁边的人 也许只有10%的相似度。 所以这就像这个草原上的细菌 和这个森林里的细菌的差异一样大。
So these different microbes have all these different kinds of functions that I told you about, everything from digesting food to involvement in different kinds of diseases, metabolizing drugs, and so forth. So how do they do all this stuff? Well, in part it's because although there's just three pounds of those microbes in our gut, they really outnumber us. And so how much do they outnumber us? Well, it depends on what you think of as our bodies. Is it our cells? Well, each of us consists of about 10 trillion human cells, but we harbor as many as 100 trillion microbial cells. So they outnumber us 10 to one. Now, you might think, well, we're human because of our DNA, but it turns out that each of us has about 20,000 human genes, depending on what you count exactly, but as many as two million to 20 million microbial genes. So whichever way we look at it, we're vastly outnumbered by our microbial symbionts. And it turns out that in addition to traces of our human DNA, we also leave traces of our microbial DNA on everything we touch. We showed in a study a few years ago that you can actually match the palm of someone's hand up to the computer mouse that they use routinely with up to 95 percent accuracy. So this came out in a scientific journal a few years ago, but more importantly, it was featured on "CSI: Miami," so you really know it's true. (Laughter)
那么就像我刚才说的, 这些不同的微生物有着不同功能, 从消化食物 到与各种疾病, 代谢药物相关联,等等。 它们是怎么做到这些的呢? 一部分是因为 虽然我们肠道中的微生物 只有 3 磅重, 它们的数量却 远远超过了我们的生理数据。 它们到底比我们多多少呢? 这就取决于你们怎么比较了。 是比我们身体的细胞数量多么? 我们每个人都有大概 10 万亿的细胞, 但是我们身体中有 100 万亿的微生物细胞。 所以呢,它们的数量是我们的十倍。 你现在可能会想, 我们是人,这是由 DNA 决定的, 但是我们每个人都有 2万个人类基因, 取决于你怎么数, 但是和我们的基因相比, 微生物有 200-2000万的基因。 所以不论怎么看,我们在数量上都 被微生物共生体远远超过了。 结果还显示, 在我们留下人类 DNA 痕迹的时候, 还在所有被我们触摸的东西上 留下了我们微生物的 DNA。 我们在几年前的一个研究中展示了, 你甚至可以将手掌上携带的物质信息 与日常所用的鼠标上的相匹配, 准确率达到95%。 这项结果几年前发表在 一个科学杂志上, 但更重要的是,它在美剧 “犯罪现场调查:迈阿密”中播出了, 所以你们得相信确有其事。 (笑声)
So where do our microbes come from in the first place? Well if, as I do, you have dogs or kids, you probably have some dark suspicions about that, all of which are true, by the way. So just like we can match you to your computer equipment by the microbes you share, we can also match you up to your dog. But it turns out that in adults, microbial communities are relatively stable, so even if you live together with someone, you'll maintain your separate microbial identity over a period of weeks, months, even years.
那么我们的微生物从哪来呢? 如果像我一样, 你们有宠物狗或者孩子, 你们可能有些不太乐观的怀疑 (微生物来自不干净的地方), 但这的确是事实。 就像我们能够通过微生物 将你和你的电脑设备匹配, 我们同样能将你和你的狗匹配。 但是结果显示成人的 微生物菌落是相对稳定的, 所以即使你和其他人一起生活, 你在几周,几个月,甚至几年间 仍将保留你自己独特的微生物特性。
It turns out that our first microbial communities depend a lot on how we're born. So babies that come out the regular way, all of their microbes are basically like the vaginal community, whereas babies that are delivered by C-section, all of their microbes instead look like skin. And this might be associated with some of the differences in health associated with Cesarean birth, such as more asthma, more allergies, even more obesity, all of which have been linked to microbes now, and when you think about it, until recently, every surviving mammal had been delivered by the birth canal, and so the lack of those protective microbes that we've co-evolved with might be really important for a lot of these different conditions that we now know involve the microbiome.
事实表明我们的第一个微生物菌落 大多取决于我们是怎样出生的。 因此顺产出生的婴儿, 它们体内的微生物基本跟 阴道的菌落是相像的, 然而剖腹产出生的婴儿, 他们体内的微生物看上去 更像皮肤中的。 这可能与剖腹产婴儿的 不同的健康状况有一定关联, 例如这些婴儿更容易患上 哮喘,过敏,甚至肥胖, 这些目前可能都与微生物有关, 当你想到,所有存活的哺乳动物 都是通过产道出生, 因此缺乏那些与我们共同进化的 保护性的微生物, 这可能对我们目前已知的 与微生物有关的许多不同症状 来说非常重要。
When my own daughter was born a couple of years ago by emergency C-section, we took matters into our own hands and made sure she was coated with those vaginal microbes that she would have gotten naturally. Now, it's really difficult to tell whether this has had an effect on her health specifically, right? With a sample size of just one child, no matter how much we love her, you don't really have enough of a sample size to figure out what happens on average, but at two years old, she hasn't had an ear infection yet, so we're keeping our fingers crossed on that one. And what's more, we're starting to do clinical trials with more children to figure out whether this has a protective effect generally.
当我的女儿在几年前通过紧急剖腹产 出生的时候, 我们都做了相应的准备, 确保她被本应通过自然分娩而获得的 阴道微生物所附着。 目前,当然还无法确定这是否 对她的健康有影响,对吧? 样本只有一个孩子,不管我们多爱她, 你都不能从单一样本 得出平均的结果, 但是两岁了,她还没得过耳部感染, 所以在这一点上我们很幸运。 而且,我们开始用更多的孩子 做临床实验, 看看是否微生物在整体上 起到了保护作用。
So how we're born has a tremendous effect on what microbes we have initially, but where do we go after that? What I'm showing you again here is this map of the Human Microbiome Project Data, so each point represents a sample from one body site from one of 250 healthy adults. And you've seen children develop physically. You've seen them develop mentally. Now, for the first time, you're going to see one of my colleague's children develop microbially. So what we are going to look at is we're going to look at this one baby's stool, the fecal community, which represents the gut, sampled every week for almost two and a half years. And so we're starting on day one. What's going to happen is that the infant is going to start off as this yellow dot, and you can see that he's starting off basically in the vaginal community, as we would expect from his delivery mode. And what's going to happen over these two and a half years is that he's going to travel all the way down to resemble the adult fecal community from healthy volunteers down at the bottom. So I'm just going to start this going and we'll see how that happens.
那么,我们的出生方式对体内 起初的微生物种类有着巨大影响, 但是在那之后呢? 我再给你们看一下这张 人类微生物工程的数据图, 每一个点代表人体某一部位的样本, 一共有250个健康成人的数据。 你已经看到过孩子们身体 以及智力的成长。 现在,你将第一次看到 我同事的孩子们在微生物方面的成长。 我们要看的是 一个婴儿的粪菌, 排泄物的微生物菌落代表着大肠的菌落, 每周取样,持续了大约两年半。 我们从第一天开始, 婴儿从这个黄点开始, 你们可以看到他基本就在 阴道生物菌落里, 因此我们可以推测 他的出生方式(顺产)。 随后的两年半里 就是他沿着这条线一路下移, 向底端的健康成人志愿者的 粪便菌落靠近。 我们现在就来看看 这一过程是怎样发生的。
What you can see, and remember each step in this is just one week, what you can see is that week to week, the change in the microbial community of the feces of this one child, the differences week to week are much greater than the differences between individual healthy adults in the Human Microbiome Project cohort, which are those brown dots down at the bottom. And you can see he's starting to approach the adult fecal community. This is up to about two years. But something amazing is about to happen here. So he's getting antibiotics for an ear infection. What you can see is this huge change in the community, followed by a relatively rapid recovery. I'll just rewind that for you. And what we can see is that just over these few weeks, we have a much more radical change, a setback of many months of normal development, followed by a relatively rapid recovery, and by the time he reaches day 838, which is the end of this video, you can see that he has essentially reached the healthy adult stool community, despite that antibiotic intervention.
你们看到的, 记住每一步只是一周, 你们看到的,是每周的 儿童粪便微生物菌落的变化, 每周的差异都 远比人类微生物工程研究中的 健康成人个体之间的差异,也就是 底端的一些棕色的点,要大得多。 你们可以看到他 正在接近成人粪便菌落。 这大约要花上两年。 但是有个意外的现象出现了。 他此刻正在注射 防止耳部感染的抗体。 你可以看到菌落的巨大变化, 然后又迅速恢复。 我倒回去再给你们看一遍。 我们看到,几周之间, 有一个更明显的变化, 退回到几个月之前的 正常发展阶段, 然后又迅速恢复, 当他在第838天的时候, 也就是这段录像的结尾, 可以看到他已经到达了 健康成人菌落, 尽管其间受到了抗体的干扰。
So this is really interesting because it raises fundamental questions about what happens when we intervene at different ages in a child's life. So does what we do early on, where the microbiome is changing so rapidly, actually matter, or is it like throwing a stone into a stormy sea, where the ripples will just be lost? Well, fascinatingly, it turns out that if you give children antibiotics in the first six months of life, they're more likely to become obese later on than if they don't get antibiotics then or only get them later, and so what we do early on may have profound impacts on the gut microbial community and on later health that we're only beginning to understand. So this is fascinating, because one day, in addition to the effects that antibiotics have on antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are very important, they may also be degrading our gut microbial ecosystems, and so one day we may come to regard antibiotics with the same horror that we currently reserve for those metal tools that the Egyptians used to use to mush up the brains before they drained them out for embalming.
这个结果很有趣, 因为它提出了一些 关于儿童时期注射疫苗的问题。 我们进行的早期干预, 对微生物菌落的变化 确实有影响, 这是不是就像在波涛汹涌的 海面扔进一块石头, 波纹迅速就会消失了? 有趣的是,当你在婴儿出生后的 前6个月注射抗体, 他们之后患肥胖症的可能性 比不注射或者推迟注射抗体要更大, 因此我们在早期的干预会对 肠道微生物菌落及之后的健康状态 产生深远影响, 后者我们才刚刚开始了解。 这很有趣,因为总有一天, 抗生素除了 在耐抗生素细菌上产生 重要影响之外, 它们还可能使我们的肠道 微生物生态系统发生退化, 因此,总有一天我们将以 恐惧的视角看待抗生素, 如同看待那些埃及人用来 搅碎大脑,并将其清除来制作 木乃伊的金属器具一样。
So I mentioned that microbes have all these important functions, and they've also now, just over the past few years, been connected to a whole range of different diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, colon cancer, and even obesity. Obesity has a really large effect, as it turns out, and today, we can tell whether you're lean or obese with 90 percent accuracy by looking at the microbes in your gut. Now, although that might sound impressive, in some ways it's a little bit problematic as a medical test, because you can probably tell which of these people is obese without knowing anything about their gut microbes, but it turns out that even if we sequence their complete genomes and had all their human DNA, we could only predict which one was obese with about 60 percent accuracy. So that's amazing, right? What it means that the three pounds of microbes that you carry around with you may be more important for some health conditions than every single gene in your genome.
我提到了微生物的 所有这些重要功能, 以及近年来,它们与 若干不同疾病的相关性, 包括炎症性肠病, 心脏病,结肠癌, 甚至肥胖。 事实证明了肥胖对健康影响很大, 如今我们仅仅通过 肠道的微生物菌落, 就可以辨别你是瘦还是胖, 准确率达到了90%。 虽然这听上去相当不错, 但是在某些方面把它作为 医学测验手段仍然存在问题, 因为我们也可以 直接区分哪些人肥胖, 甚至不需要知道他们 肠道微生物的情况, 但是即使我们得到 他们完整的基因序列, 他们的全部人类DNA, 我们在预测哪个人有肥胖症的问题上 也只能达到60%的准确率。 这很让人意外对不对? 这意味着你所附带的三磅的微生物 可能比基因组的每一个基因, 对于健康状态来说更重要。
And then in mice, we can do a lot more. So in mice, microbes have been linked to all kinds of additional conditions, including things like multiple sclerosis, depression, autism, and again, obesity. But how can we tell whether these microbial differences that correlate with disease are cause or effect? Well, one thing we can do is we can raise some mice without any microbes of their own in a germ-free bubble. Then we can add in some microbes that we think are important, and see what happens. When we take the microbes from an obese mouse and transplant them into a genetically normal mouse that's been raised in a bubble with no microbes of its own, it becomes fatter than if it got them from a regular mouse. Why this happens is absolutely amazing, though. Sometimes what's going on is that the microbes are helping them digest food more efficiently from the same diet, so they're taking more energy from their food, but other times, the microbes are actually affecting their behavior. What they're doing is they're eating more than the normal mouse, so they only get fat if we let them eat as much as they want.
用老鼠,我们可以做更多的实验。 对于老鼠,微生物可能 跟更多的生理状况产生联系, 包括多发性硬化, 抑郁症,孤独症,还有肥胖症。 但是我们怎么区别微生物上的差异 是与患病的原因还是结果相关呢? 我们能做的就是多养一些老鼠, 将它们在无菌膜里, 且自身不带微生物的条件下养大。 然后加入一些 我们认为比较重要的微生物, 看看会发生什么。 当我们从肥胖的老鼠身上 提取一些微生物 并移植到基因正常的老鼠身上, 那只老鼠自身不带微生物, 是在无菌膜下培养的, 这只老鼠与从正常老鼠身上 获得微生物相比变胖了。 这项结果绝对让人惊讶。 这是因为,有时候微生物 帮助它们更有效的消化同样的食物, 因此它们从食物中汲取了更多的能量, 但是其他时候, 微生物会影响寄主的行为。 这些老鼠比正常老鼠吃得更多, 因此如果让它们尽情地吃, 它们只会更胖。
So this is really remarkable, right? The implication is that microbes can affect mammalian behavior. So you might be wondering whether we can also do this sort of thing across species, and it turns out that if you take microbes from an obese person and transplant them into mice you've raised germ-free, those mice will also become fatter than if they received the microbes from a lean person, but we can design a microbial community that we inoculate them with that prevents them from gaining this weight.
这个结果的确值得注意,对吧? 这预示着微生物可以 影响哺乳动物的行为。 你也许会想知道这种影响 是否会跨物种, 结果表明,如果你从肥胖的 人身上提取微生物, 移植到无菌老鼠身上, 这些老鼠与从瘦的人 身上获得微生物相比会变得更胖, 但是我们可以设计一种微生物菌落, 把它们接种到防止增肥的微生物上。
We can also do this for malnutrition. So in a project funded by the Gates Foundation, what we're looking at is children in Malawi who have kwashiorkor, a profound form of malnutrition, and mice that get the kwashiorkor community transplanted into them lose 30 percent of their body mass in just three weeks, but we can restore their health by using the same peanut butter-based supplement that is used for the children in the clinic, and the mice that receive the community from the healthy identical twins of the kwashiorkor children do fine. This is truly amazing because it suggests that we can pilot therapies by trying them out in a whole bunch of different mice with individual people's gut communities and perhaps tailor those therapies all the way down to the individual level.
对于营养不良, 我们也可以做类似的实验。 在由盖茨夫妇基金会 资助的一个项目中, 我们关注了马拉维的儿童, 他们患有一种叫做夸休可尔症的 深层次的营养不良, 将夸休可尔症的菌落移植到老鼠身上, 它们在仅仅三周之内,体重就 减少了30%, 不过我们可以通过补充用来 进行儿童临床治疗的 花生黄油类补品来恢复它们的健康, 而老鼠接受来自于 夸休可尔症患者的健康双胞胎的 微生物菌落,就一切表现正常。 这太好了, 它预示着我们可以进行试点治疗, 用成人个体肠道内的微生物菌落 在一大群不同的老鼠间进行实验, 或许还能把治疗方法 依据个人情况进行调整。
So I think it's really important that everyone has a chance to participate in this discovery. So, a couple of years ago, we started this project called American Gut, which allows you to claim a place for yourself on this microbial map. This is now the largest crowd-funded science project that we know of -- over 8,000 people have signed up at this point. What happens is, they send in their samples, we sequence the DNA of their microbes and then release the results back to them. We also release them, de-identified, to scientists, to educators, to interested members of the general public, and so forth, so anyone can have access to the data. On the other hand, when we do tours of our lab at the BioFrontiers Institute, and we explain that we use robots and lasers to look at poop, it turns out that not everyone wants to know. (Laughter) But I'm guessing that many of you do, and so I brought some kits here if you're interested in trying this out for yourself.
因此我认为每个人都有机会 参与这项发现 是非常重要的。 几年前, 我们启动了这个叫做 “美国人肠道”的项目, 可以把你添加到微生物分布图上。 这是目前我所知道的拥有 最多人力资助的科学项目, 目前有超过8000人已经注册。 他们要做的就是送来他们的样品, 我们得到他们的微生物DNA序列, 并把结果反馈给他们。 我们也在消除个人信息之后把 这些结果公布给科学家,教育工作者, 感兴趣的公众,等等, 所以任何人都能得到这个数据。 另一方面, 当我们在介绍位于BioFrontiers研究所的 实验室的时候, 我们说明了我们在用机器人 和激光研究粪便, 不过看起来并不是每个人都想去了解。 (笑声) 但我猜你们许多人都感到好奇, 所以我带来了一些测试包, 如果你们感兴趣 可以自己来尝试一下。
So why might we want to do this? Well, it turns out that microbes are not just important for finding out where we are in terms of our health, but they can actually cure disease. This is one of the newest things we've been able to visualize with colleagues at the University of Minnesota. So here's that map of the human microbiome again. What we're looking at now -- I'm going to add in the community of some people with C. diff. So, this is a terrible form of diarrhea where you have to go up to 20 times a day, and these people have failed antibiotic therapy for two years before they're eligible for this trial. So what would happen if we transplanted some of the stool from a healthy donor, that star down at the bottom, into these patients. Would the good microbes do battle with the bad microbes and help to restore their health? So let's watch exactly what happens there. Four of those patients are about to get a transplant from that healthy donor at the bottom, and what you can see is that immediately, you have this radical change in the gut community. So one day after you do that transplant, all those symptoms clear up, the diarrhea vanishes, and they're essentially healthy again, coming to resemble the donor's community, and they stay there. (Applause)
我们为什么要做这个研究? 实验表明微生物不仅对 我们的健康状态很重要, 而且可以帮助治疗疾病。 这是我们已经 可以直观化的最新结果之一, 合作者是明尼苏达大学的同事。 再看一次那张人类微生物分布图。 我们现在来看一看—— 我要在这片区域里加入一些 得 C. diff.的人群。 这是一种很恐怖的腹泻, 患者每天要去将近20趟厕所, 而且这些人长达2年的抗体治疗 并未见效, 他们符合参与这项试验的要求。 如果我们从健康的捐献者 体内移植一些粪菌, 就是这个底部的星形物, 到这些病人身上。 这些好的微生物会不会 与坏的微生物竞争, 从而帮助患者恢复健康呢? 我们看看到底发生了什么。 四位患者将得到来自底部 健康捐献者身体内的微生物, 你们能看到, 肠道菌落迅速的发生了变化。 移植一天之后, 所有症状消失了, 腹泻也消失了, 他们的确又恢复了健康, 与捐献者的菌落相似, 并且保持不变。 (掌声)
So we're just at the beginning of this discovery. We're just finding out that microbes have implications for all these different kinds of diseases, ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to obesity, and perhaps even autism and depression. What we need to do, though, is we need to develop a kind of microbial GPS, where we don't just know where we are currently but also where we want to go and what we need to do in order to get there, and we need to be able to make this simple enough that even a child can use it. (Laughter)
这项探索才刚刚开始。 我们仅仅发现微生物能够指向 不同的疾病, 从炎症性肠病到肥胖, 甚至自闭和抑郁症。 然而我们需要做的, 就是开发一个微生物全球定位系统, 我们不仅要知道目前的进展, 还要知道应该朝什么方向努力, 要如何实现我们的目标, 我们还要让这个过程足够简单, 甚至连小朋友也可以操作。 (笑声)
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)