Michael Harrop
Oh my god, what a disturbingly overconfident & erroneous comment. Especially coming from someone who has been immersed in science for so many years. I recognize your name from Reddit from over 10 years ago.
Due to Brandolini’s law, your comment made me look up how to block users on Lesswrong, which apparently isn’t possible. I now have to waste a huge amount of time debunking your egregious misinformation. I will only do it this once because in my experience, people who exhibit this kind of behavior will continue it. So in the future I will simply refer to this exchange as evidence that you are not someone who deserves to be taken seriously or responded to.
On any evidence-based website, your comment is the type that deserves a warning and then a permanent ban if it happens again. That you’ve had an active account on this website for 15 years makes me want to avoid this website.
The human microbiome is irrelevant to this topic.
The topic is how to make people/babies healthier, better developed, and more intelligent. Anyone who reviews this information should be able to conclude that your statement is ridiculously false:
The microbiome is highly heritable (usual twin studies & SNP heritabilities), and it is caused by genes and the environment, as well as unstable; its direct causal effects in normal humans are minimal.
You started off with largely irrelevant statements and ended with severe misinformation. FMT (fecal microbiota transplant) studies demonstrate causation. You can look through the humanmicrobiome.info wiki or do a literature search to see how many FMT studies there are showing “non-minimal” effects. So much so that a 2020 review said they thought the results were implausible.
Some examples are the plethora of studies showing that the benefits of fasting, the ketogenic diet, and other dietary interventions, are dependent on the gut microbiome, and the benefits can be transferred via FMT. And the same goes for exercise, grip strength, and muscle mass.
We know that it is supremely irrelevant because environmental changes like antibiotics or new food or global travel which produce large changes in personal (and offspring) microbiomes do not produce large changes in intelligence (of oneself or offspring)
Firstly, this is false.
Low-dose penicillin in early life induces long-term changes in murine gut microbiota, brain cytokines and behavior (2017): https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15062
Antibiotics that kill gut bacteria also stop growth of new brain cells: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160519130105.htm
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-80982-6 - “These results suggest early antibiotic use may impact the gut-brain axis with the potential for consequences in early life development.”
Many more: https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#harms-of-antibiotics
The damage done by antibiotics affects the offspring as well: https://humanmicrobiome.info/maternity/#brain-function
You also have to keep in mind that antibiotic use increases the risk for diseases that are known to decrease brain function.
Secondly, antibiotics are one of the biggest threats and degraders of human health and development: https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/
germ-free humans exist and
I have read that it’s not possible to make a germ-free human. What you linked to as evidence for your claim is a person living in a sterile isolator. That prevents him from exposure to new microbes, but it doesn’t make him germ-free.
germ-free mice apparently even live longer
From your citation (just adding context): “The reduced early food intake and smaller body weight of adult GF rats may be the reason ad libitum fed GF rats live slightly longer”. Here are some studies indicating that “germ-free” has detrimental consequences:
Various health problems: https://archive.is/1Rxak
“Germ-free animals have numerous other immunological defects that may lead to disease, which implicates a role for the microbiota in actively supporting health” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4095778/
Behavioural and neurochemical consequences of chronic gut microbiota depletion during adulthood in the rat (2016) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306452216305127
Germ-Free Mice Exhibit Mast Cells With Impaired Functionality and Gut Homing (Feb 2019): https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.00205/full
“Studies have characterized differences in host physiology in germ free and colonized mice, the most striking being the enlarged cecum” (2015) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4083815/
Most of this page is meaningless mouse studies (infamous for not replicating and getting whatever result the experimenter wants and the animal model literature having huge systemic biases)
Let’s take a look at why that is: https://archive.fo/Nzz1Y#selection-1735.10-1735.11 - Summary: It’s largely due to microbiome differences.
Here’s a quote from the OP post:
Let’s put it all together; if super-SOX works as well in humans as it does in mice, this is how you would make superbabies
So are you dismissing the entire OP post as well because of this?
While animal studies definitely have their limits, it seems extremely erroneous to essentially dismiss an entire area of study since much of the research was done in mice. A lot of mouse research isn’t ethical to do on humans.
Most of this page is meaningless mouse studies, and the handful of actual human studies I see here are all garbage
You’re dismissing an entire field of tens of thousands of studies. If you’re right, you should be spending your time protesting such a massive waste of time and money rather than arguing with some random blog commenter.
breastfeeding where the beneficial effects disappear when controlling for just some confounds
This is false. There are cited studies there that control for confounders and still found benefits, including to intelligence.
much-touted correlations like autism
Again, there are plenty of studies showing causation. https://humanmicrobiome.info/brain/#autism
There’s not a single result on this page that provides a shred of evidence for your implied thesis that microbiome interventions could, even in theory, possibly matter to ‘how to make superbabies’. It doesn’t.
This is such a ridiculous statement. But it’ll be up to each reader to review the page and decide for themselves.
He was right. BTW, you remember what happened in 2021, right?
You linked to uBiome, which was a company that sold gut microbiome tests. Your citation of them is irrelevant to your claim that “the microbiome is a fad”. If you said “microbiome testing is a fad”, that would arguably be accurate, but it’s a completely different claim.
EDIT:
Your response, your edit, and the votes, are a painful example of the need to make humans smarter. Unintelligent people being adamantly wrong are extremely harmful:
* https://maximiliankohler.blogspot.com/2021/06/idiocracy-part-1-scientists-in.html
* https://medium.com/@MaximilianKohler/a-critical-look-at-the-current-and-longstanding-ethos-of-childbearing-the-repercussions-its-been-6e37f7f7b13fEvery step of the way, intelligent and well-informed people are hindered by those who are not.
Another interesting phenomenon is that AI will likely help to nullify this harmful human behavior. People will simply ask an AI, “Who is right?”.
I agree with the majority of this, especially the part where we are in a race to increase our own intelligence before we destroy ourselves with AI or something else.
But I think there’s something missing in your analysis.
“Genes are the piano; the microbiome is the pianist.”
It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life (Feb 2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00327-x—I see it’s closed access now; here are some quotes.
More on the microbiome & genetics: https://humanmicrobiome.info/genetics/
Examples of how important the gut microbiome, and the parents’ health, are for human development: https://humanmicrobiome.info/maternity/
A page specifically on the brain: https://humanmicrobiome.info/brain/
I have the exact same goal as you, and I’m working on it from the microbiome perspective. See:
Please see my response to the person you’re replying to.
In my last reply, I’ve already listed multiple reasons why we don’t advertise the precise criteria. Did you see that?
Elsewhere, in more purely scientific settings, I definitely have discussed the exact criteria and the evidence for them.
Furthermore, these are arguably proprietary business trade secrets, yet I’ve made them public in order to try to advance this area of science.
I think your comment ignores the plethora of evidence supporting donor-quality hypotheses. Much of it was presented in the OP, and covered the permanent extinction of our host-native microbiomes, along with the exponential rise in chronic disease.
Your suggestion seems to be to “try to find a plethora of plant and wildlife species in a forest that has been burned to the ground”. Whether you can piece it back together is unknown, but I don’t think that’s the best approach to take right now.
Also, one of the major problems is that most people are not even bothering to look for high quality donors, and expecting FMT to get great results with low quality donors. The gut microbiome is incredibly complex, and we are so far from understanding it well enough [1] to be able to replace whole stool with synthetic FMT. Though I’m not discouraging people from trying it, and making headway there.
I would recommend anything by Martin Blaser. I also have a wiki section here on the permanent damage from antibiotics, that extends even beyond their killing of microbes: http://humanmicrobiome.info/Intro#more-effects-of-antibiotics
There is a tremendous amount of antibiotic overuse/abuse in the medical system. The current guidelines are likely far too generous in promoting their use, and there’s even 30%+ overuse according to current guidelines.
I had an extremely depressing related event recently. I had a donor applicant that was seemingly perfect in every way. Their physical condition and ability were amazing/perfect. Their mental condition seems fantastic as well. But someone gave them frequent amounts of antibiotics over their lifetime, which was almost certainly unnecessary. And now they’re suffering the consequences of it (in seemingly-subtle ways).
There are research groups that have largely given up on finding ideal microbiomes in modern society, and have thus resorted to visiting remote tribes, such as the Hadza [1][2].
I know from experience (unfortunately only temporary) that such “ideal donors” do exist in modern society. They’re just very rare, and it even seems that the people more likely to qualify are less likely to apply. Many of them are blissfully excelling in life and don’t need/want to be bothered by some “weird poop thing”. Many of them are making millions of dollars, or on their way to make millions of dollars and don’t want to jeopardize that opportunity.
HumanMicrobes.org donor criteria are listed on the Donors page. The specifics beyond those basic criteria are not listed for a variety of reasons, including, that they may change over time as we experiment and learn more, and that we need people to be honest with their applications.
Support for athletes as donors is listed here: http://humanmicrobiome.info/FMT#impact-factors
You are definitely correct that many athletes may be doing harm by pushing themselves beyond what their body is naturally capable of.
I’ve screened hundreds of college and professional athletes at this point, including gold medalist Olympians. The vast majority of athletes don’t qualify or rank high.
There are companies trying to identify that, and use it to create “synthetic” FMT capsules, but it’s largely not yet known, and in my opinion it will be decades before we can replace whole stool with synthetic FMT.
After all, you have to find a super-donor first.
Have you discussed or tried petitioning the government to focus on this? I’ve been in D.C. for the past 8 months lobbying the government for something related. I’ve learned a lot about how the government works, and I’ve been thinking that it could be quite effective if people like you, Yuval Noah Harari, Max Tegmark, Geoffrey Hinton, etc., formed a small lobby group to get government action on this.
It’s very much related to the current “Make America Healthy Again” focus.