Missing Microbes: How Killing Bacteria Creates Modern Plagues


by Martin Blaser (2014)

I was initially concerned that "Missing Microbes" would replicate the information I had already gleaned from other sources, such as Tim Spectre's "The Diet Myth" (2015), but I needn't have worried.  I have recently taken to rationalising the highlighting system in Kindle books so that I will have a clue as to what sort of information it is.  Pink indicates new and vital information, blue denotes new vocabulary that I wish to retain and yellow indicates material that is repeated but that is so important that I wish to ram it home and retain it.  "Missing Microbes" is covered in pink  and  blue .The only place where yellow cropped up was in the two page epilogue. In other words, this book is cram pack full of new and, given the state of the science, pretty detailed information principally about a certain microbe that is, or at least should be, very close to all our hearts, (ie: in our stomachs).

Of course, there is still a very long way to go.  Books on the microbiome repeatedly give the impression that we are only in the foothills of discovery when it comes to understanding the subject, which can be quite frustrating as the problems our ignorance may be causing are very real and present right now.   We desperately need solutions, and one only hopes that Martin J. Blaser, the author and director of the Human Microbiome Programme at New York University is pushing the research as hard as he can and that things have progressed even since 2014.

As is typical of the current swathe of popular science books,  "Missing Microbes" strings the science into a narrative history of its discovery.    It is eminently readable, despite the frustrations and the terrible guilt, since almost every parent, including the author, will have done something wrong, it seems.  It also struck me as tragic that people have been so nearly right when they attributed autism to a medical intervention (ie: vaccination) but that they attributed the problem to the wrong intervention and therefore, in all likelihood, continued to contribute to the problem.

Outside of the book, recent press reports seem to be suggesting that a quarter of all other medications, aside from antibiotics, impact upon the microbiome, which only adds to the feeling that we don't know enough. All in all, one is left with the strong sensation that knowledge is power, and that we want more of it as soon as possible.

Rating: 8/10


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