Overall, I would give this book a rating of 4 out of 5 stars. Although it contains truly revolutionary ideas that both have wide ranging scale, and can be easily understood with the proper background in DNA switches, it lacks a pure academic spirit in its writing style, method of citation, and common use of personal anecdotes.
To briefly sum up the book’s argument: Although a human being is currently understood as being one ‘species’ of animal, it is actually much more accurate to describe a human being as an entire ecosystem unto itself, with thousands of strains of bacteria, viruses, fungi, Archaea, etc. living and flourishing all throughout the body. They live on our skin, inside our gut (making up the majority of our immune system, there), and in every organ of our body. This set of thousands of different micro-organism species that make up the entire genome of a human being is christened, “The Bionome”, a combination of Micro-Biological and Genome. It is, in other words, the real, and total, human genome.
More importantly, however, this Bionome is unique to each person, much like fingerprints. It is inherited almost chiefly from the mother, as only one set of Bionomes can be safely passed from parents to child. (This is one reason the egg is so large, while spermatozoa are so small, containing almost only the male’s chromosomes). This Bionome grows with us as we do, changing as we change from children to adults. Finally, not only does it act in an important way symbiotically with our own ‘bodies’, but its output can alter the genetic switches in our DNA, allowing for certain types of generation to generation evolution, as if by magic.
One example of such micro-switching controlling the expression of genes is known as ‘The Returning Soldier’ effect, where significantly more sons are born after a war, as if to replace the men who were lost. According to the new theory of the Microbiome, this effect could be explained by the bacteria inside females reacting to the added stress of a war, secreting proteins that can alter our DNA switches, making certain change part of our internal programming.
Another important aspect of this book is its advocation of starting and maintaining a healthy Microbiome throughout our lifetimes. This begins with breast feeding as a baby, passing important strains of bacteria from mother to child, as well as skin touching between mother and child, another essential part of the correct seeding of the Microbiome. Today, we have probiotics to use to help correct imbalances in our microbiome, mostly through our gut, and these can be very useful in a large variety of health conditions, even obesity. Because it is the correct balance of the useful strains of bacteria that is important, not the quantity of a single one. It is surprising how much our living bodies are a product of the symbiosis of so many organisms, and the implications for future medicine are rife with such possibilities.
- This was a Book Review for The Human Superorganism (How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life), by Rodney Dietert, Phd, Dutton, 2016 (NY), 341 pages.
