Blinded by the reductionist science of modern medicine, scientists, practising doctors and the greedy pharmaceutical industry were after microbes, ever since the 1800s, trying to win the battle against germs using drugs, vaccine and even good hygienic methods based on antiseptics of all kinds. We have been successful in creating some really deadly germs by virtue of misplaced faith in antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. These super-bugs have been the cause of many hospital-based infections (also known as nosocomial), especially found in elderly patients in intensive-care units.
 

In the year 2000, Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, writing in the journal, Science, opined that we should get off our moral high horse and stop calling ‘germs evil and we good’. He wrote that each host (man) and its parasite (germ) possibly forge a new super-organism, their genomes merging with one another, yoked as a chimera. Ever since, many other researchers have come up with evidence that there are many, many such chimeras inside the human system and that our human genome is only a minuscule picture of our true genome. 
 

Do not panic if you find that nine out of ten of your body cells are microbial and not yours! In the gut alone, more than 1,000 species of germs bring in 100 times more genes than our own DNA. Microbial genes control the energy that we absorb from our food and also the way our immune system functions. This should induce some humility in humans; they would shed their arrogance when they come to know that they need the help of germs to survive.
 

I would suggest that the reader think for a minute about the wisdom of injecting more than 20 vaccines into the innocent bodies of newborn children. In the setting of our meta-genome, this could even lead to wrong trigger of the immune system resulting in the so-called unknown aetiology ‘auto-immune diseases’. This is only my speculation for the time being. It is time to free the mind from the shackles of reductionist science of modern medicine.
 

These ideas of micro-biomes and virinomes (i.e, meta-genomes with germs and viruses) would have been labelled madness by our reductionist pundits who get millions of dollars of grants for genetic engineering and stem cell research. If one patient with blindness is able to see with the help of stem cell therapy, newspapers highlight it as a great discovery; thousands of failures are never reported. The same is true of genetic engineering; a large majority of such interventions do not help the patient and might even produce another new disease. The millions of germ genomes in our bodies must be having a hearty laugh at the foolishness of these scientists! 
 

In fact, until as recently as 1999, microbiologists had no clue that they were missing out on millions of species of germs. The enormous undercounting of species came to light with David Relman of Stanford University showing many more species from human-gum smear across cultures. Turning to gut and stool specimens, he discovered hundreds of new hitherto unknown species. That was the beginning of the thinking on meta-genomes. According to www.bacteriality.com, a website devoted to chronic disease research, biomedical researcher Trevor Marshall created a model describing how these bacteria, along with intra-cellular bacteria and pathogens that live together inside protected communities called biofilms, might be able to cause chronic disease and dysregulate the immune system. I foresee a new age of enlightenment in medicine with a better understanding of homo sapiens. 

 

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He can be reached at [email protected])