What Is A Man? Our Bacteria Can Be Our Hosts, And Not Vice Versa - - Alternative View

What Is A Man? Our Bacteria Can Be Our Hosts, And Not Vice Versa - - Alternative View
What Is A Man? Our Bacteria Can Be Our Hosts, And Not Vice Versa - - Alternative View

Video: What Is A Man? Our Bacteria Can Be Our Hosts, And Not Vice Versa - - Alternative View

Video: What Is A Man? Our Bacteria Can Be Our Hosts, And Not Vice Versa - - Alternative View
Video: Mark Spigelman- Mutuaslism -how bacteria helped shape human evolution and vice versa 2024, March
Anonim

When you were young, everyone told you that you were unique and individual. The idea of individuality has been around for centuries, but the more we learn about our bodies, the more biologists suspect that the microorganisms within us mean that we are more a collection of trillions of organisms than individuals.

In February, the journal PLOS published a study according to which microorganisms living in your mouth, your stomach and on your skin "question the very concept of our self."

The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz came to the concept of the uniqueness of the individual only in 1695, walking through the garden with a German princess. “So they started collecting leaves, and each leaf was, of course, different,” says Tobias Rees, director of the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles and co-author of the work published in PLOS. Leibniz suggested that each sheet should be unique and individual.

Prior to this, “humans were part of a natural, god-given cosmos and could not separate from nature,” says Rhys. "Even artificial or technical was intended to complete only what nature left unfinished."

However, as the natural sciences developed, we began to think more the way Leibniz thought of leaves: the brain, immune system, and genome make us individual.

Physician Franz Gall once told Immanuel Kant that the shape of his brain, and therefore the shape of his skull, makes him a philosopher, Rees says. Many philosophers regard this moment as a transitional one: people began to think of the brain as a unique phenomenon. With the thousands of brain studies that came later, it became difficult to imagine an individual without a brain.

In 1960, an Australian immunologist named Frank McFarlan Burnett received the Nobel Prize for his work that demonstrated that the immune system separates us from another. The immune system separates us from the pathogens, viruses, and bacteria that make us sick.

Genetic research and the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick gave the idea of individuality even more confidence.

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But the more scientists learn about microflora, the more they revise the idea of a person as a separate organism. "There is now overwhelming evidence that the normal development and maintenance of the body depends on the microorganisms that we harbor," the scientists say.

Microbes, which make up about half of the cells in our body, affect the human brain, immune system, gene expression, and other processes.

Microbes can produce the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has been linked to feelings of euphoria and aggression, says Thomas Bosch, professor of zoology at the University of Keele and one of the co-authors of the work. An imbalance in gut microbes leads to certain diseases, including autism, depression, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, allergic reactions, and certain autoimmune diseases, although there is very little research on this topic so far.

This does not mean that humans are not unique - we are definitely different from each other - but this uniqueness of ours is due not only to genetics or our brains, but also to the organisms that live in and on our bodies.

"What has traditionally been considered part of the people themselves are mostly of bacterial origin, that is, 'not ours,'" says Bosch. New discoveries in microbiology force us to rethink our understanding of ourselves. Also remember that human genomes are intertwined with microbes, and gene editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 require microbial counting.

When we consider the fact that microbes have such a large impact on our brains, immune systems and genomes, it suddenly becomes difficult to define the “individual” in a person. Rees says that when he first brought this to the co-authors, it was difficult for them to accept.

“They have always thought of themselves as human beings, individuals, whole and united, but now what?” Rees says. Therefore, they concluded that the definition of the human individual is much more vague than we are used to thinking. We are a living community, or a "mega-organism".

Not all microbiologists or philosophers would agree with this, of course. Ellen Clarke, professor of philosophy at the University of Leeds in the UK, says microbial contributions to the human body don't really change who we are.

“We have many aspects that depend on genes outside of us - I can't reproduce without a pair, for example,” she says. Why is the effect on microbes so important in comparison? However, the microflora, in her opinion, on the whole provides "a good antidote to individualism."

Jonathan Eisen, a microbiologist at the University of California, Davis, believes the authors overestimate the influence of microbes on our behavior.

“Certain microflora affect all sorts of aspects of behavior in mammals and probably in humans. But drugs do the same. And a TV. And the school. Does this mean that our perception of ourselves should include the drugs we are taking?"

Eisen also points out that these ideas are not new. Previous research has already looked at the idea of an expanded humanity, like the concept of the hologenome developed in the 1990s, in which the genome is defined as the sum of all genes of all cells in the body. Eisen says the microflora offers a great opportunity for scientists, philosophers and artists to discuss the interweaving between their work areas, but Clarke remains skeptical.

This is why we need more discussion on this topic. The influence of microflora on humans is difficult to deny.

Ilya Khel