September/October 2016

The science of the microbiome is arguably one of the hottest topics in medicine, and rightfully so. A deeper understanding of the ecology of the flora in our bodies is…

Figure 1: This 2001 photo of DNA sequencing equipment at the NIH’s Intramural Research Center, Advanced Technology Center, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, suggests the “hundreds, hundreds, hundreds” of machines required at…

In 1991, a group of Italian researchers announced that they had isolated a new antibiotic from a chemical soup brewed with a soil-dwelling bacteria called Planobispora rosea. The drug was…

Food allergies and sensitivities have always been a public health problem but are becoming more prevalent worldwide. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that millions of Americans have…

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” said Sherlock Holmes creator and author Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887. In this era of big data, and especially…

Cigarette smoking is tied to lung cancer, but people still smoke. Why do people start smoking in the first place? That is one of the many complex, interdisciplinary questions behind…

It was six years ago that fecal transplantation first received prominent media attention and the public began to fully appreciate that the bacteria and other microbes in their bodies could…