Most mornings I read the New York TImes online. Today an editorial caught my eye and my imagination. Titled “A Universe of Us”, it referred to a recent paper in Nature by a team of researchers led by Jeffrey Gordon. He’s a microbiologist at Washington University. I know nothing about microbiology....but Washington U. is my alma mater. Go science!
The editorial notes that most of us are scarcely aware of the estimated 10 trillion individual cells that make up our bodies or the more than 100 trillion bacteria that inhabit each of us in a benign fashion. “Whatever else we are,” the editorial states, “we are also a complex ecosystem, a habitat.”.
Mr. Gordon’s team has written about a ‘viral identity’ that each of us possesses. Viral DNA that is “highly stable and highly distinct, even among closely related humans.”. The virome is the large community of benign viruses within us, part of the “microbiotic universe that makes us healthy.".
Mr. Gordon refers to individual human beings as “a genetic landscape.”.
It is all much greater than we can ever imagine.
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