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Responsible stewardship for communicating microbiome research to the press and public

Nature Medicine volume 25, pages 872–874 (2019)Cite this article

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The human microbiome has captured the attention of both researchers and the lay press. Given its emerging role in health and disease, it is imperative that studies are communicated well so that in turn the public does not misinterpret the findings.

Human microbiome research, which has illuminated the diverse array of microbes that are in our guts and that colonize most surfaces of our bodies1, has captured the attention of scientific and public audiences. Functional studies have demonstrated that these indigenous microbes help the human host perform vital functions such as pathogen colonization resistance, digestion, and vitamin absorption. The once tenaciously held belief that the only good microbe is a dead one has mostly been dispelled and replaced by the growing appreciation that many microbes are beneficial. Gut microbes found at various sites along the gastrointestinal tract appear not to be at those locations by chance, but are matched to region-specific factors in the host that promote the fitness, stability, and resilience of these microbes. At the same time, we have come to realize that recent shifts in environmental, dietary, and societal factors appear to be upsetting critical host–microbe relationships shaped by eons of evolutionary processes. These disturbances likely underlie the increased risk in humans for many disorders that were rare or uncommon a century ago but that now have increased with alarming frequency, such as food allergies, complex immune diseases, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and developmental deficiencies. Public interest in the human microbiome heightened even more with the news that the transference of fecal microbes from a healthy donor was more effective than antibiotics in curing recalcitrant Clostridium difficile infection2. With the demonstration that human microbiomes have ‘druggable’ potential, these have emerged as important targets for therapeutic development by the pharmaceutical and health industry.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medicine, the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Yue Shan & Eugene B. Chang

  2. National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Julia A. Segre

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  1. Yue Shan
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  2. Julia A. Segre
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  3. Eugene B. Chang
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Correspondence to Eugene B. Chang.

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Shan, Y., Segre, J.A. & Chang, E.B. Responsible stewardship for communicating microbiome research to the press and public. Nat Med 25, 872–874 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0470-y

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