This article was first published in the January 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Can faecal transplants treat schizophrenia? Do probiotics cure asthma? Only in Jonathan Eisen's awards for fake science and hyped reporting.
Last year, a flurry of media articles made a controversial claim: oral hygiene could determine a woman's risk of preterm birth. Journalists had widely misinterpreted a study by foetal-health experts at the Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, which showed that microbes in babies' guts matched those in their mothers' mouths. The study also correlated preterm birth risk with certain types of oral bacteria in women. Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and science blogger based at the University of California, Davis, pounced on the media's misleading reports: the study made no causal link between mouth bacteria and preterm birth, he wrote on his blog, so it was ludicrous to imply that better oral hygiene averted problem pregnancies. Eisen slammed journalists from The New York Times and Science, plus the study's lead author, who'd fuelled the misinformation during interviews. Each received his mock "award" for "Overselling the Microbiome", which he uses to alert readers to dubious science.
When he's not quashing misinformation, Eisen, 49, runs a lab at UC Davis's Genome Center where he studies microbes, the vast community of micro-organisms made up mostly of bacteria, viruses and fungi. He investigates how they co-evolve with their hosts and develop new functions. As the academic editor at open-access journal PLOS Biology, Eisen's also an outspoken advocate for accessible science. His research, together with his high-profile blog The Tree of Life - which receives millions of visitors - has placed him in the spotlight in recent years: he presented a talk at TEDMED 2012 called "Meet Your Microbes", giving the audience a primer on these pervasive micro-organisms.
Indeed, there are few places on Earth where microbes don't thrive; the human body is a microbial hub<sup>1</sup>, packed with possibly trillions of microbial cells that interact with our own cells in myriad ways - many of which we're only just discovering. But as research on the human microbiome unfolds cautiously, microbe pseudoscience is on the rise, inspiring Eisen to take up his weapons.
Via his blog (phylogenomics.blogspot.co.uk) he has risen to prominence as an authority unafraid to slam bad science, issuing his "awards" to make his point. "There are two ends to this. There's ridiculous stuff about why we should kill all microbes. That's the germophobia club, and then there's 'microbiomania', who think microbes are beneficial and do everything."<sup>2</sup>
If you believe what's out there, the right balance of microbes could prevent strokes, melt away obesity and improve sex drive. And a mere sampling offers a fingerprint of your future disease risk. "It's endless how much BS is out there," Eisen says. "Literally, there are clinics advertising faecal transplants to cure schizophrenia. I have given them awards." In April 2014, Eisen debunked an article concerning faecal transplants which featured David Perlmutter, an American physician known for his holistic approach to treating brain disorders. Perlmutter claimed in the interview on Mercola.com that the transplants could prevent Alzheimer's by boosting gut flora - but Eisen swiftly panned the article, saying Perlmutter "should be ashamed for misleading people like this".
In another instance, Eisen flattened a press release from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles that made the outrageous claim that probiotics can remedy everything from asthma to irritable bowel syndrome by promoting good bacteria. "There are so many sites out there offering probiotics for sale it reminds me of Viagra," Eisen chirped on his blog. And, last year, he tackled TIME for insinuating that reduced antibiotic use allows the body's microbiome to become more effective at staving off cancer, among other things. Exasperated, Eisen wrote, "Do we really need to overstate what we know in order to effect change?"
Since he launched his Misselling the Microbiome Award in August 2010, he's produced over 30 takedowns on his blog. The microbiome - overwhelming, complex, largely unknown - is ripe for misrepresentation. "One of the reasons I think it's a big deal to not oversell the microbiome, and the reason I blog about this relentlessly, is that it's really complicated," Eisen says. For instance, faecal transplants do seemingly transfer improved gut health to unhealthy people, and there is a potential link being investigated between microbial diversity and mental health. Yet in most cases, studies on microbes show observed correlations, not causal proof. According to Eisen, many aspects of our health are most likely affected by microbes, but "'most likely' isn't good enough for telling people how to medicate them" - at least not until the science advances.
Policing the microbiome is central to Eisen's identity, but when he's off duty, he prefers to improve it in a different way: by producing respectable research. Eisen isn't just a guardian of truth; he also aspires to be a "guardian of microbial diversity" according to his Twitter bio. Together with collaborators he's leading the largest microbe-sequencing project to date, based at the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, California. With the accumulated data - thousands of microbes have already been sequenced - Eisen wants to build a vast microbe "tree of life", and with it, a companion "Field Guide to Microbes" intended as an open-access tool for identification.
This quest has delved into the microbial communities of rice, corn, seagrass, frogs, fish, cats and humans, using microbe DNA to identify species. "The field guide is not just about cataloguing organisms; it's not stamp collecting. When you find new things, this is how you place them in context," Eisen says. A major goal is to pinpoint organisms that have been co-evolving with their hosts: Eisen suspects these long-time partners provide benefits. "That's important because if it's true, we can use this approach to filter through the thousands on a particular organism, and find the ones that are most likely to be beneficial," Eisen says.
In retaliation to the growing spread of misinformation, he's turning to citizen scientists. "This is a really interesting area to use for science agitation and outreach," says Eisen. Recently, his lab collaborated with the public to find out whether microbes grew differently on the International Space Station. And in an ongoing Kickstarter project called Kittybiome, they raised $23,183 to analyse samples collected from house cats, revealing traits about the feline microbiome. "I think the way to get people to understand the complexity here is to get them to actually do the research," he says. But until the public catches up, Eisen will be on the lookout, ready to debunk and defend.
1. Most microbes can't be grown in the lab so tracking their DNA in the wild, including the body, is one route to figuring out what they are. 2. Amid the germophobes and the micro-biomaniacs, "there's the in-between, which is that this is a complicated ecosystem that most likely changes every day, and the microbes don't care about us, in a positive or negative way."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
