Given how crucial microbiomes are to our overall health, a team of scientists are hoping to create a vault or a “Noah’s Ark” if you will, for human microbiomes so that we always will have access to them for disease prevention, etc. Pretty interesting!
Interesting. How about creating a DNA vault of DNA from living organisms on Earth and send it out to space? It could be digital. Hmmm, maybe even send the code for DNA in a light message though I'm not sure how much it would degrade over distance. Someone could read and then print the code to recreate our creatures and plants. Someone get Craig Ventor on the project.
I love this. Whenever I think of the microbiome I think of the two obscure gents from Western Australia who thought they were seeing H. pylori bacteria in the stomachs of ulcer and stomach cancer patients. This is where skepticism and critical thinking can sometimes end up being a form of science denial, because it took 23 years of fighting the skeptics to prove that 90% of ulcers came from the bacteria and not the stress and excess stomach acid we thought.
In the end, they won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2005 and revolutionized the treatment of ulcers, which shows what a diff these bugs can make.
