I love reading your blogs so it is great to hear there will be more in the next few months! Just wondering, maybe you can expand a bit on your choice to switch to Seed. While they seem to focus on real probiotics, they also seem like a marketing/sales focused company that probably won't get too excited about selling 'poop pills' and rather play it safe. What will you be working on mostly? Will you still be able to push to a future where probiotics have real clinical scale effects next to just supplemental results?
I'm gonna keep rallying for poop-as-medicine, because I believe there are a lot of people it can help who don't have other solutions right now. It's gonna be years before we figure out the root causes of diseases like Alzheimer's, and people shouldn't wait around for that day if there's a chance that the "shotgun" solution of FMT can help them. This is a matter of raising awareness and shifting the Overton window.
But there are also a lot of instances where we'll need more precise tools. Take the cholesterol thing: sure, a heart attack is deadly, and there are probably gut microbes that can lower the risk of heart attack by lowering your cholesterol. But I expect very few people would undergo an FMT even if it were proven to cut their risk of a heart attack, because of the ick factor (and the fact that the heart attack might not even happen if they're lucky). But practically anyone would take a cholesterol-reducing probiotic, and the sooner someone gets one of those on the market, the more lives it'll save. The folks at Seed seem genuine about wanting to move beyond standard Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria in their probiotics, so I think there's the potential to do a lot of good there.
So with one hand, I'll keep trying to change people's minds about poop. With the other, I'll work on new solutions that people wouldn't mind as much to begin with.
I used to work in a Bactron (https://us.vwr.com/store/catalog/product.jsp?catalog_number=76097-910) and one time the seal on the inner door fell off. I had so much bacteria in there that I didn't want to waste all those cultures and a good two-thirds of a tank of anaerobic gas mix to fix it by opening the whole thing up, so I spent about three quarters of an hour cursing up a storm trying to tape down various parts of the seal so that I could get the rest around that last stubborn corner, while my coworkers watched me and laughed.
Nothing like that panicked feeling of knowing your whole month's work is being held together by a few strips of yellow tape. Thanks for reading, brother
I love reading your blogs so it is great to hear there will be more in the next few months! Just wondering, maybe you can expand a bit on your choice to switch to Seed. While they seem to focus on real probiotics, they also seem like a marketing/sales focused company that probably won't get too excited about selling 'poop pills' and rather play it safe. What will you be working on mostly? Will you still be able to push to a future where probiotics have real clinical scale effects next to just supplemental results?
That's the idea, man.
I'm gonna keep rallying for poop-as-medicine, because I believe there are a lot of people it can help who don't have other solutions right now. It's gonna be years before we figure out the root causes of diseases like Alzheimer's, and people shouldn't wait around for that day if there's a chance that the "shotgun" solution of FMT can help them. This is a matter of raising awareness and shifting the Overton window.
But there are also a lot of instances where we'll need more precise tools. Take the cholesterol thing: sure, a heart attack is deadly, and there are probably gut microbes that can lower the risk of heart attack by lowering your cholesterol. But I expect very few people would undergo an FMT even if it were proven to cut their risk of a heart attack, because of the ick factor (and the fact that the heart attack might not even happen if they're lucky). But practically anyone would take a cholesterol-reducing probiotic, and the sooner someone gets one of those on the market, the more lives it'll save. The folks at Seed seem genuine about wanting to move beyond standard Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria in their probiotics, so I think there's the potential to do a lot of good there.
So with one hand, I'll keep trying to change people's minds about poop. With the other, I'll work on new solutions that people wouldn't mind as much to begin with.
Oh lordy. Anaerobic Chambers.
I used to work in a Bactron (https://us.vwr.com/store/catalog/product.jsp?catalog_number=76097-910) and one time the seal on the inner door fell off. I had so much bacteria in there that I didn't want to waste all those cultures and a good two-thirds of a tank of anaerobic gas mix to fix it by opening the whole thing up, so I spent about three quarters of an hour cursing up a storm trying to tape down various parts of the seal so that I could get the rest around that last stubborn corner, while my coworkers watched me and laughed.
Nothing like that panicked feeling of knowing your whole month's work is being held together by a few strips of yellow tape. Thanks for reading, brother