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?
身為人類,我們時常會關心 個人的健康問題, 卻總是找錯重點。 以古埃及人為例:他們非常重視 身體的各個部位,因為這將是 他們來世的軀體, 但仍會有的放矢。 以此為例。 古埃及人會謹慎處理胃、肺 肝等器官, 但對於頭部,他們只會沖洗鼻腔, 然後就隨便處理掉了, 這樣的作法合理的, 想想大腦對我們的幫助為何就知道了? 但試想如果我們所忽視 的一個體內器官 它的重量恰巧和大腦相同 決定我們會成為怎樣的人, 但因為我們的無知而被打入冷宮。 再試想,如果隨著科技的不斷進步 我們開始注意到 原來它對我們如此重要。 你還會繼續對它視而不見嗎?
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?
我想,接下來你可能會: 開始關注我們的腸道 或更多東西,比如腸道中的微生物。 當然不是只有腸道中的 微生物值得關注。 它無處不在,遊走于我們體內, 是造成人體差異, 形成不同個體的關鍵因素。 舉例來說,你有沒有發現 有些人就是特別容易被蚊蟲叮?
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.
事實上每個人的露營 經驗談都沒有造假。 拿我來說,蚊子很少叮我, 但我的太太阿曼達是牠們的最愛, 原因就是我倆表皮上的 微生物形成了 不同的化學物質,導致 蚊蟲的反應不同。
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)
目前,微生物對醫療也 發揮著重要作用。 比如,腸道中的微生物能判斷 某些止痛劑對肝臟是否 有毒副作用。 它們還能判斷其它藥物是否會 影響你的心臟功能。 如果你是只果蠅,微生物至少 能決定你嚮往的交配對象。 當然對於人類尚未明斷 但相信有一天我們會 找到答案(笑聲)
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?
所以,微生物的作用很多。 它們有助於食物消化。 可以錘煉我們的免疫系統。 還能幫助我們抵抗疾病, 甚至會影響我們的行為。 那麼這些微生物群落 有著怎樣的結構呢? 我想不太會像這樣, 但我們可以藉此 了解生物多樣性。 不同的地方正因為 有了不同的生物體 才賦予了他們獨有的特色。 對於微生物界,道理相同, 但我也必須承認: 它們在顯微鏡下看起來都一樣。 所以,既然無法從 視覺上區分他們, 那麼我們只能從 基因序列來辨別, 在一項名為人類微生物組 項目的計劃中, NTH 投資了 17300 萬美元, 同時該項目還吸引到了 數百位研究人員 為的是弄清所有A's、 T's、 G's和C's 以及人體內所有微生物 的排列組合。 結果我們看到了 這樣一幅景象。 這樣你很難看出它們 的具體位置,對嗎?
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.
我的實驗室為此開發 了一種計算技術 可將序列數據取值 到兆兆字節 同時排列組合成可用性 更高的圖譜樣式, 所以如果我們將250名 健康的志願受試者 體內的微生物數據代入其中, 會顯示這樣的圖譜。 這其中的每個點都代表整個 微生物群落中各個複雜的微生物。 就像我說的,它們的樣子 都差不多。 所以我們的觀察重點是 每個點是代表一位健康 志願受試者的某個軀體部位 的一個微生物群落。 我們像區分大陸板塊一樣, 用不同顏色 在圖譜中標識不同部位。 由此可以發現 在軀體不同區域 會聚集不同的微生物。 現在我們看到的綠色群落 是口腔微生物群落。 在另一邊藍色的群落是 肌膚的微生物群落, 紫色的是陰道微生物群落, 而在右下方棕色的是 肛腸區的微生物群落。 近幾年來,我們驚奇地發現 人體不同部位的微生物 竟然各不相同。 所以,如果我們觀察一個人口腔和 腸道中的微生物, 會發現這兩個部位的微生物群落 的差異相當大。 人體中微生物群落的差異比 暗礁和草原微生物群落的差異更大。 細想真是不可思議。 這表示如果從微生物生態學來看, 人體中微生物存在的些許差異 轉變為地球生態,其差異 可以是天差地別的。
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.
也就是說,兩個看似相同的人 未必有相同的體內環境。 你可能聽過這樣的說法 如果從人類的 DNA 來看, 每個人都幾近相同。 以 DNA 來說,你和 隔壁的人相似度可達 99.99%。 但是說道腸道微生物就不一樣了: 從腸道微生物的角度來看, 相鄰兩人的相似度可能僅有10%。 這就好比草原中存活的細菌 不同於森林中存活的細菌。
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)
如同我之前提到的, 正是這些各不相同的微生物 在人體中產生了不同的功用, 從消化食物 到影響各類病症、 代謝藥物等等。 那麼微生物是如何 集結成群,發揮作用的? 一方面是因為, 這些僅重三磅的腸道衛生物 其實際數目卻是驚人的。 你問數目有多驚人? 這取決於你怎麼看待人體。 如果你支持細胞論? 那麼每個人都是由約10萬億 個人體細胞組成的, 而我們體內存有的微生物細胞 達100萬億個。 也就是說相當於10個我們。 當然,如果你推崇DNA的概念, 那麼目前已知的確切數字是, 我們體內的遺傳因子約為20,000個, 而微生物基因的數量可達 200萬至2000萬個。 所以無論是支持哪種理論, 我們都是由無數的 微生物共生體組成的。 所以我們不但要研究人類的DNA, 我們所接觸對象的 微生物DNA也是有待挖掘的領域。 我們在過去幾年進行的研究顯示, 如將某人留在常用鼠標上的物質 與其本身的掌紋相比較, 其匹配率可高達95%。 數年前曾有科學雜誌報道過這項發現, 不過美國影集“CSI:邁阿密系列” 令它街知巷聞, 可見這不是編劇杜撰的。 (大笑)
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.
那麼微生物從何而來? 像我一樣,如果你有養狗或小孩, 可能難免會對此產生些 邪惡的疑慮, 順便一提,這都說得通。 正如我們可以將你 留在計算機設備上的 的微生物與本體作比較, 同樣的結果也可以印證在狗的身上。 結果我們發現,成人的微生物群落 相對穩定。 所以即使你和某人生活在一起, 仍可維持數週、數月、甚至數年 你獨有的微生物特性。
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.
也就是說我們最初的微生物群落 取決於我們的出生環境。 所以,對於順產的寶寶 他們的微生物特性通常更接近 於陰道部位的群落特征, 而剖腹產的寶寶, 其微生物特性更接近于 肌膚的微生物群落。 而這種差異也可能被認為與 剖腹產寶寶的體質健康有關聯, 比如目前就有較多人 認為微生物可能 與哮喘、過敏甚至是肥胖症有關, 基於這一點,反觀直至目前, 每個經產道分娩的哺乳動物, 以及所缺少的、 共同進化、起保護作用的微生物, 可能正是催生出不同 微生物學條件的重要因素。
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.
幾年前我太太在緊急情況下 剖腹產下我的女兒, 我們只能自食其力 後天給予女兒如同順產般 可受到的陰道微生物群的保護。 目前,我們尚無法判斷 這對她的健康是否有用,不是嗎? 我們的觀察樣本只有一個孩子, 無論我們多愛她, 我們還是缺少足夠的觀察樣本, 推斷出平均水平, 直到她兩歲時, 尚未患支氣管炎, 為此我們也一直祈禱她健康。 同時我們也開始通過臨床試驗 觀察其他孩子, 藉此判斷這種微生物 是否能起到一般保護作用。
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.
可見分娩方式不同, 初生時體內微生物的不同, 其影響也是巨大的, 那麼接下來我們該做什麼? 這裡我將再次出示這張 人體微生物項目數據圖譜, 圖譜中的每個點都 代表 250 位健康成年人 各個身體部位的取樣結果。 各位已經熟悉兒童的生理發育, 也瞭解他們的心理成長, 現在,你們將首次見證 我同事的一個孩子 在微生物意義上的蛻變。 我們接下來要觀察的對象 就是這個孩子的“粑粑”, 即代表腸道的糞便菌落, 我們每週採樣,持續近兩年半時間。 我們從第一天開始觀察, 這個黃球的運動軌跡 就是嬰兒的微生物發育過程, 它基本上從陰道菌落開始出發, 這也符合孩子的分娩方式。 在兩年半的時間裡, 它由上而下運動, 最終與底部的健康志願者 糞便菌落相吻合。 我們來看這一運動過程是怎樣的。
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.
請注意,黃球的每一步移動都歷時一周, 大家可以看到這個孩子 糞便微生物菌落的每週變化情況, 這種變化遠遠超出了 人類微生物菌落專案對列中 健康成人個體之間的差異。 底部的褐色球表示 成人個體的微生物菌落。 我們可以看到, 它正開始接近成人糞便菌落。 此時已過去了近兩年時間。 但一場“奇跡”即將在這裡上演。 孩子因為耳部感染而服用了抗生素, 這導致其微生物菌落發生巨變, 接著是相對快速的修復。 我們再來看一遍。 經過短短幾周時間, 我們發現微生物菌落的變化越來越大, 拖累了孩子數個月的正常發育, 接下來是相對快速的修復, 等到第838天, 也就是這段影片的結尾處, 我們可以清楚地看到, 儘管有抗生素的干預, 孩子的糞便菌落已經與健康成人相差無幾。
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.
這個過程非常有趣, 它暗示了對不同年齡段的兒童 進行干預會引發某些問題。 微生物的變化是如此之快, 是否意味著我們早期的干預行為, 就像在風大浪急的海面投入一粒石子, 泛不起絲毫漣漪? 結果,我們卻驚奇地發現, 如果兒童在出生後六個月內服用抗生素, 他們將來會比同時期不服用抗生素 或稍晚服用的兒童更容易變胖, 所以我們早期的干預行為 可能會給兒童的腸道微生物菌落 以及他們未來的健康埋下嚴重的隱患。 這是令人震驚的發現, 因為將來會有一天, 抗生素除了對耐抗生素細菌 產生重大影響之外, 還可能削弱人類腸道微生物生態系統, 到那時,我們會談抗生素色變, 那種恐懼感絲毫不亞於對埃及人 使用金屬工具搗碎人腦, 然後使腦漿流盡 進行屍體防腐的做法所產生的恐懼。
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.
我剛提到了微生物具有這些重要作用, 並且經過前幾年的潛心研究, 我們發現微生物與 多種疾患息息相關, 包括炎性腸病、 心臟病、結腸癌, 甚至肥胖症。 肥胖對人的影響不可小覷, 通過觀察人體腸道內的微生物, 我們現在有9成的把握 判斷一個人是消瘦還是肥胖。 儘管這聽上去令人振奮, 但就醫學試驗而言, 某些方面仍存在障礙, 因為即使你對腸道微生物一無所知, 也能分辨這兩個人中誰比較胖, 而即便掌握了他們的完整基因組序列 以及全部的人體DNA, 我們也只有6成的把握 推斷誰患有肥胖症。 是不是感到大跌眼鏡? 這意味著對於某些健康狀況而言, 人體內的三磅微生物可能 比基因組內的每一個基因都重要。
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.
後來,我們對小鼠做了大量的試驗。 小鼠體內的微生物關乎各種健康狀況, 包括多發性硬化、 抑鬱症、自閉症,還有肥胖症。 然而,如何判斷這些與疾病息息相關的 微生物差異究竟是因還是果? 我們做了這樣一個試驗: 在無菌氣泡袋中培育體內 無自身微生物的小鼠, 然後,給它們添加一些 我們認為重要的微生物, 看會發生什麼情況。 當我們從肥胖症小鼠 身上提取微生物, 移植到氣泡袋中培育的 體內無自身微生物的 基因正常小鼠身上時, 它比從普通小鼠移植微生物時變得更胖。 這背後的原因令人震驚不已。 有些時候,微生物幫助 小鼠更高效地消化食物, 從而攝取更多的能量, 另一些時候,微生物實際 會影響它們的行為。 它們吃的比正常小鼠多, 如果不加限制, 只會越吃越胖。
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.
這一點很耐人尋味,對嗎? 它意味著微生物可能 影響哺乳動物的行為。 大家可能很好奇, 這一做法能否沿用到其他物種? 從一個胖人身上提取微生物, 移植到無菌培育的小鼠身上, 與從一個瘦人身上提取微生物相比, 前者會導致小鼠變得更胖, 但我們可以設計一種微生物菌落, 給這些小鼠接種, 預防其體重增加。
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.
這種做法同樣適合治療營養不良。 在一個蓋茨基金會資助的專案中, 我們把關注的目光投向馬拉維 患有誇休可爾症, 即惡性營養不良的兒童, 我們將誇休可爾菌落移植到小鼠體內後, 小鼠在短短三周內 體重暴降了30%, 不過,我們可以利用在診所中治療孩子的 花生醬補充物使小鼠重獲健康, 相比之下,從誇休可爾症孩子的健康 同卵雙胞胎身上 移植菌落的小鼠卻健康狀況良好。 這真是不可思議, 它意味著我們可以 使用不同的人體腸道菌落, 在一群小鼠中進行療法試點, 並且有望做到個性化定制。
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.
所以,我認為讓每個人都有機會 從這一發現中獲益至關重要。 為此,我們在幾年前 啟動了這個名為“美國腸道”的專案, 讓每個人在這張微生物圖上占得一席之地。 這是我們迄今已知的最大眾籌專案—— 已有8000多人報名參加。 專案流程很簡單,報名者寄來樣本, 我們生成微生物DNA序列, 再將結果寄回給他們。 我們還將結果“去識別化”, 發佈給科研人員、教育工作者, 還有感興趣的普通民眾, 讓每個人都能分享這些資料。 不僅如此, 我們還來到 BioFrontiers 研究所的實驗室, 循循善誘地向大家介紹使用 機器人和鐳射來觀察“粑粑”, 結果,並不是所有人都表現得興致盎然。 (笑聲) 但我猜想在座的各位很多人都有興趣, 所以我今天帶來了一些試驗用具, 有興趣的話,大家可以親自嘗試。
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)
我們為什麼要這樣做? 因為我們發現,微生物不僅有助於 我們瞭解自身的健康狀況, 而且能夠治癒疾病。 這是我們與明尼蘇達大學的同事 能夠形象化展示的最新發現之一。 我們再來看一下這張 人類微生物菌落圖。 現在,我們來看這裡-- 我準備在這裡增加一些 難辨梭狀芽孢桿菌攜帶者的菌落。 這是一種嚴重的腹瀉細菌, 人感染後一天要跑20多趟廁所, 這些腹瀉患者用了 兩年的抗生素療法仍不見成效, 最終入選了我們的微生物療法試驗。 如果我們將健康捐贈者的糞菌, 即這張圖底部的星形微生物, 移植到腹瀉患者身上會怎樣? 良性微生物與惡性微生物會相互較量, 幫助患者恢復健康嗎? 讓我們仔細觀察究竟會發生什麼。 其中四名患者將從底部的 健康捐贈者那裡移植糞菌, 然後你會看到腸道菌落 立刻發生天翻地覆的變化。 等到某一天移植完成後, 所有症狀蕩然無存, 腹瀉徹底消失, 患者基本恢復健康, 形成了與捐贈者相似的菌落, 並長久地保持下去。 (掌聲)
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)
所以,這就是我們新的發現。 微生物對各種不同的疾病, 從炎性腸病到肥胖症, 甚至包括自閉症和抑鬱症, 都具有十分重要的意義。 我們要做的, 就是開發一種微生物 GPS, 讓我們瞭解自己目前身在何處, 未來要去往何方, 也知道如何到達目的地, 而且,我們要讓一切變簡單, 連小孩都能信手拈來。 (笑聲)
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(掌聲)