“10” Predictions for the Future of Your (Microbial) Health

By Rob Dunn | March 19, 2013|

Every day it seems like some new discovery is revealed ab0ut the microbial life on our bodies, in our bodies and around our homes. The tendency in writing about such studies is to make sweeping conclusions about what is and is not and, of course, how we should live and what we should do. But the truth is that these new studies are part of a big lunge science is making into a great darkness. The lights we are shining are revealing treasures and discoveries, but no one has a lens big enough to see the whole picture, not yet anyway. The temptation is to stand at the site of each new discovery and try to make the prediction about what is next. I’m going to do something else here. I’m going to try to predict not the next discovery but instead the next ten years. You can check back in ten years to tell me whether I was full of it. I probably am, but what fun is a blog if you can’t speculate a bit. For what it is worth, these wild ideas come largely from extrapolating what we know about ecology of non-human species in general and applying it to humans and the microbes around us. In other words, if humans obey the ecological regularities the last fifty years of ecology have revealed then it will be discovered that…