The Human Microbiome

In 2011, at the Society for Integrative Oncology's international meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, Francis Collins, PhD, head of the National Institutes of Health, shocked the audience when he asserted that although his work in the human genome was exciting, he was more impressed by the potential represented by the National Institutes of Health's investment in the Human Microbiome Project. “This is the future,” he stated with great certainty. Surprisingly, this is also the past. More than 100 years earlier in 1908, Ilya Ilyich Metchnikov, co-winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize for Medicine, noted that “the dependence of the intestinal microbes on the food makes it possible to adapt measures to modify the flora in our bodies and to replace harmful microbes by useful microbes.”1 He coined the term dysbiosis to describe microbial ecological imbalance in the gut.