Ethical and rigorous human microbiome science requires radical interdisciplinary co-laboration

Current human microbiome science is still marked by a European and North American bias with many important ethical implications on the horizon. In addition, the limited research on other understudied populations is not without its ethical quandaries either. In this presentation, I discuss and clarify these ethical issues by disentangling these into 3 main subsets: European and North American bias, cultural insensitivity, and lack of meaningful collaboration and inclusion. Thereafter, I propose an overall approach to solving these quandaries by introducing the notion of radical interdisciplinary co-laboration, in which different academic and non-academic stakeholders mediate their knowledges and labor together in studying human microbiomes. I will elicit how the proposed approach will render microbiome science more ethical and at the same time render the very science of microbiomes more precise and rigorous.