Original Blog Blurb from 2012
Today's episode checks in with my nephew, who we last heard from in Episode 12. Given his mathematical tendencies, I always assumed he'd go into engineering or something, but now he's talking the same pre-med smack his sister did. So I take the opportunity to put on the evolutionary medicine hat and plug one of my favorite tech-ahead-of-its-time stories. The Russians started using phage therapy in the 1920s. (Hello? CoC adventure waiting to be written!) For the academically minded, more history of the field here, including specific criticisms of the early studies that held the field back from commercial development (as opposed to the pharmaceutical conspiracy theories).
If you're not a student of biological viruses, here's a little background watching as to how they work, mechanically. That's a different question from why there are viruses to begin with (Biologists pretty these up by calling them proximate and ultimate explanations, but I'm keepin' it real in my own vernacular way.). Why would a genome throw away the ability to copy itself, thereby becoming dependent on other cells? Because it's easier. I personally think of viruses as criminal genes, in somewhat the same way cancers are made of criminal cells. Of course, the word "criminal" implies some kind of forethought or moral failure to most people, and that's not what I mean. I mean that there are the same kind of short-term advantages to fitness for antisocial behaviors at any level of organization, from genes up through cells to individual humans to rogue states. In other words, moral failures of individuals are examples of the larger category of cooperation failures, not the other way around.
Updates from 2022
Obviously, I am no longer at NC A&T, and the podcast is no longer on iTunes, but I still do mean it when I say, “Thanks for listening!”
Matt did in fact do the medical school thing, and is now interning at Vanderbilt. Their auto-generation of publications isn’t working properly. I need to follow up about that.
Fecal transplants have slowly, slowly grown in popularity. As of 2020, there were still no official medical statistics on how many of these procedures were being performed in the US, and so these doctors had to adapt a theoretical model of the financial cost/benefit to the system if patients with Clostridium difficile infections (C diff, or CDI) who relapsed were given microbiome support instead of multiple rounds of antibiotics. They call this FMT.
The model estimated that if FMTs were being used to treat all multiple recurrent CDI cases, then 48,000 FMTs (95% confidence interval [CI] 34,000–62,000) would be performed annually in the United States.
And yet by 2015, only three years after this episode, the Fecal Transpant Foundation estimated that at least 10,000 of these procedures were being done at home by do-it-yourselfers. And according to this article from 2021, commercial companies are jumping on the bandwagon.
All of this is for one condition, recurrent Clostridium difficile infection. There are plenty of other possible applications, which I’ll have to return to another day.
In the meantime, here’s another impressive young fellow I met just last night, doing a YouTube service project for NCSSM. He has his own channel, which I’ll link to in the comments — assuming he agrees to give me the address.
In part to give him a boost, I’m again including the link to The Sample, an automated AI newsletter recommendation service. The first time I did this, I think I got about 100 extra views.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
VSI Episode 50