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Biotech Science

Humans Are Superorganisms 81

Posted by timothy from the one-way-of-looking-at-things dept.
colonist writes "You are not completely human. You are a superorganism made up of human cells, fungi, bacteria and viruses. That's the view of scientists from Imperial College London and Astra Zeneca, published in Nature Biotechnology. Microbes in the gut can weigh up to one kilogram, forming the second largest metabolic 'organ'. Human cells and genes are outnumbered by microbial cells and genes. 'Understanding the man-microbe interaction is likely to be crucial in realising personalised medicine and healthcare in the future,' says the lead researcher."
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Humans Are Superorganisms More

Humans Are Superorganisms

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  • Well (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 ) <.moc.liamtoh. .ta. .l3gnaerif.> on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @08:01AM (#10502437) Homepage
    It's a point of view. Under this concept, the only simple organisms would be bacterial, because even eukaryotic cells could be seen as 'superorganisms', harboring components of bacterial origins (mitochondrions) we can't live without.

    And I guess, under this point of view, that even Earth itself could be seen as a very large, living and breathing 'superorganism'... not unlike environmentalists see it, actually.
    • I guess you could still break down a bacteria into even smaller parts. And eventually we will be able to break these smaller parts down into even smaller parts.

      If you think about it that way we are no more than a bunch of randomly accumulated atoms, electrons, or whatever even smaller stuff there is, that has been set free back in the days of the big bang.

      • Re:Well (Score:5, Insightful)

        by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:06AM (#10502939) Journal
        That's why I never liked biology. Too much of it seems focused on definitions, rather than real substance. "Organism" is a word, nothing more. There is nothing fundamental about it.
        • That and astronomy... whenever an object evolving around the Sun is discovered, we have the media trying to define whether it's an astroid, planet, death star, etc.

        • "Organism" is a word, nothing more. There is nothing fundamental about it.

          Yes and no. It's important to not get to caught up in word definitions, but I think how you see something can profoundly effect how you understand it, and come up with solutions. Words are the shortcuts we use to understand incredibly complex things. Define a word differently and your entire view of it can change. The thing isn't different of course, but that's not the point.

          I think the point in this new definition is more t
        • The value of biological paradigms is in their application, not just how they're pronounced. We have developed techniques, medical, chemical and social, to work with "organisms", of whatever they turn out to be composed. We can tweak those techniques to recognize the more complex compositions of the organisms with which we treat. Any sensible redefinition of "organism" to recognized new components must also revise the connotations, associations, so we don't stick the new components with constraints appropria

        • That's why I never liked biology. Too much of it seems focused on definitions, rather than real substance. "Organism" is a word, nothing more. There is nothing fundamental about it.

          excuse me, but what are you talking about? science in general is always focused on definition. its purpose is to break down the "world" into parts, that we are able to comprehend. defining and categorising is vital to our communication and thinking. now there is something fundamental about it.

          • science in general is always focused on definition

            You're confusing science with linguisics. Science is focused on finding truth, not inventing words. Words are helpful in communicating truth, but words are not themselves truth.

            • no, you got me wrong.

              what i'm saying is, that the whole "human process" is reality, because we are able to learn and differ things from other things. we are constantly categorising the sensoric input we receive. this is more than words, it's our way to be.

              science is doing something, that is pretty fascinating: it's mostly categorising things we are not able to perceive. it's our mind, that is extending our senses. and if you want to communicate the data you gain and put it to any use, you have to name it.
              • But that's not the purpose of science. The purpose of science is to discover new truths, not to communicate them. Words and definitions are important, but defining things is not science in itself. Even the scientific method is about predicting the future, not talking about the past.
      • the distribution of quarks, atoms, bakteria, cells, proteins whatever magnification you prefer is exactly not random. This makes you, firstly an 'it', an object, and later an 'I', a conciosness. Please don't dismiss the (I'm sure) wonderful being that is 'you' as random.
        • True. 'I', or 'you', or the guy sitting next to me, might not be completely random. Though I'd like to think that pretty much everything in this universe started out random, and just developed it's own complex mechanisms later on.

          [please don't take any of the following literally as I am no scientist, just try to get the general idea]

          Planets for example are said to be born by matter clumping together because of it's own gravity. Before, this matter was only more or less randomly drifting particles.

          Why sho
          • it might well have started out random. But so have the atoms within a crystal. Yet, after much randomness, in distribution and process, there is order. So I don't disagree in the slightest that we originate from randomness, my opinion is just that now, we are something different. An alternative view on the subject would be to say: There is no randomness, just uttlery complex order.

    • Re:Well (Score:3, Interesting)

      by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 )

      Under this concept, the only simple organisms would be bacterial, because even eukaryotic cells could be seen as 'superorganisms', harboring components of bacterial origins (mitochondrions) we can't live without.

      Mitochondria are certainly not generally considered organisms. I assume this would be because they are not capable of independent reproduction (like virii, which were mentioned incorrectly in the summary as organisms). I'm fairly sure eukaryotic cells aren't considered organisms either.

      And I

      • Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)

        by reverseengineer ( 580922 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @10:50AM (#10503806)
        I think the mitochondria argument is in reference to the idea of "endosymbiosis," which suggests that mitochondria (and chloroplasts) were originally independent prokaryotic organisms that were at some stage incorporated into eukaryotic cells, the primary evidence for this being that these organelles have their own DNA. They then became highly specialized at a certain task (aerobic respiration, photosynthesis) and discarded the machinery required for independent survival. The eukaryotic cell benefited by gaining sets of powerful new energy pathways in nice self-contained packages, and the organelles benefited by being passed on whenever eukaryotic organisms reproduced (you have your mother to thank for your mitochondria, as yours descend from the mitochondria of her egg cell). As to whether mitochondria are alive, well, biology has a way of making airtight definitions very difficult- after all, there are plenty of complex species which are completely dependent on other species in order to live and reproduce; we call them parasites.

        Now, despite that, I'm personally in the "not an organism" boat, as mitochondria are really not much different from other "opportunistic" pieces of DNA like viruses and plasmids. It just happens that the bag the DNA comes in is extraordinarily useful to the host cell. Indeed, while mitochondria are completely dependent on host cells to reproduce, life on earth would be far different- there'd be no way an ATP-guzzler like the human brain could have evolved without the benefit of aerobic respiration, for instance.

        In reference to the whole "humans are superorganisms" idea, one of the things I got from a microbiology course I took in college was the ubiquity of microorganisms on and in the human body- and how their relationship to the host organism can be anything from beneficial to deadly. I think that considering the other billion residents of the body when examining avenues of treatment is a wise move.

      • You said: Google for "Gaia". This is exactly what ssome environmentalists say.

        Isn't this the same mentality that Issac Asimov had in Foundtation's Edge and Foundation and Earth of the planet Gaia? Only that the parts were more interconnected?
        • I have no idea. I think the whole question of what is/isn't a lifeform is a rather pointless one. Life is whatever we define it to be. Is an ant farm one life or many? Is the Earth one life or a lot? Is a mother and her fetus one life or two? I don't think there's an empirical answer to these questions. You can define life however you want.
          • That old "what is 'life'?" canard is really tired. Much more interesting, and tractable, is the "what is 'intelligence'?" question. After I've built up weeks of complex state in my computer's RAM, is it ethical to powercycle it? If the Earth was seeded with RNA 3.5B years ago, which evolved to us, and the exochemical processes from which that RNA derived also contained matter distributed in a humanoid shape, is that god?
            • seeing how this ram is 'powercycled' every couple of milliseconds (ok, I'll concede, not all at once), I think not ;)
              • Quantum consciousness believers might say the same about us, but much higher frequency - Bell's theorem. If we back you up before reincarnating and restoring to your clone, is it OK to execute you a few times a day?
                • yes, but wouldn't the heisenberg uncertainty principal make impossible the discovering, transmitting and restoration of that quantum state? If the state at the quantum level translates directly to our state of consciousness, this the implications of uncertainty can not be ignored. So, if I understand all this correctly, it is quite possible for us to discover all necessary state of computer ram (indeed, if we couldn't the whole question would not arise) but it is impossible to do the same to humans. In my
                  • When "computers" are complex enough to take charge of their state without humans at the controls, even reproducing, sometimes described as the approaching Singularity, will it be unethical for them to shut us down, as our minds seem closer to rocks than to their own? We're transporting quantum states already, with electron and photon quantum entanglement. And Kurzweil's "Age of Spiritual Machines" seems to approach more rapidly every day. Maybe we'll just have to judge these miracles for ourselves as they a
                    • well, I think that conciousness is not a matter of degrees, especially when it regards morality. For me its a boolean function. So hopefully, if ever a mind arises from complexity (I believe this too), it'll share this view and treat us as like we treat it. Or two put it better: do onto others as others should do onto you.
                    • Maybe - I'm too drowsy to tell the difference right now. I hope I'm not being to selfish in letting you think this one through for me. Thanks for doing the hard work.
                  • This all depends heavily on the resolution needed to actually reproduce "conciousness". It's easy to copy a bit pattern because you don't need to worry about the spin of every electron in the area storing the bit. I have my doubts that such resolution is actually needed for recording a brain's state, either. (Mostly because I don't believe that the human body is capable of reading, modifying, and maintaining such delicate information; especially maintaining it over long time periods).

            • Much more interesting, and tractable, is the "what is 'intelligence'?" question. After I've built up weeks of complex state in my computer's RAM, is it ethical to powercycle it?

              But this is exactly the distinction I think we should avoid. Is it unethical to destroy a computer's built up complex state? It depends on your purpose, not on some universal concept of "intelligence" and whether or not the computer falls under it. In fact, I don't even think the words "ethical" and "unethical" exist as a stric

              • Un/ethical is a strict dichotomy in a strictly coded ethics. But you're right to observe that our ethics are rarely coded, let alone strictly. Our highest ethic is survival, as individuals, family, community, species. So when our survival relies on rebooting computers daily, we avoid the inverse question of whether human mental complexity is all that weighs against the convenience to some of murder. The fetish for human value is the main impediment to valuing emerging artificial minds. And we're probably be

                • So when our survival relies on rebooting computers daily, we avoid the inverse question of whether human mental complexity is all that weighs against the convenience to some of murder.

                  On the other hand, when computers become intelligent enough to threaten our survival (however slightly), we'll start considering it.

      • So, you expect us to believe what you have to say about mitochondira, but then you go ahead and use the word 'virii'?

        Uhhh huhhhh.

  • icky... (Score:2, Funny)

    by dave-tx ( 684169 )
    Wow, now I really feel like I need a shower.

  • I, for one, welcome our new...

    (you get the picture)

  • It's called... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by n54 ( 807502 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @08:13AM (#10502518) Homepage Journal
    ...symbiotic relationship (yes yes I know, you can all say "I've got a relationship" now)

    Nothing to see here folks, move along

  • No surprise for some of us.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bad Boy Marty ( 15944 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @08:20AM (#10502561) Homepage
    Having experienced acute diverticulitis some years ago, and having been treated with antibiotics that essentially killed off all the flora & fauna in my intestines, this is no surprise to me at all. The human intestines (and I presume the same for most mammals) by themselves are just amazingly inefficient at extracting nutrition. Most of the work of digestion is actually performed by the microbes & bacteria & fungus that live there (and usually, quite happily).

    (The alternative to the antibiotics was surgery, and while I do appreciate my surgeon's intent to avoid surgery, I might just do it the other way around if it should ever happen again. Don't want it to happen to you? Eat *lots* of whole grain and other fiber. You *really* don't want to annoy all them living things in your intestines!)
    • I've heard that yoghurt can help rebuild the flora in the gut, and tried to eat as much as I could after a bout with staph and some antibiotics that did a number on my own microorganism friends.

    • Re:No surprise for some of us.... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Just a correction - our digestive system is damn good for what it does. Most of the work of digestion is performed by our digestive system, not our commensal organisms.

      Bacteria are great at providing certain things for us - B vitamins is one that springs to mind; but make no mistake - we can digest and absorb most things (carbohydrate, fatty acids, protein, minerals, vitamins) just fine without them.

  • What's new? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Finuvir ( 596566 ) <rparle AT soylentred DOT net> on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @08:22AM (#10502576) Homepage
    What's new here? We've known for a long time that eukaryotic cells contain bacteria that do most of the interesting chemical work for us. Chloroplasts in plants are seperate organisms that photosynthesise. Mytochondria, which are so useful in tracing animal lineages, are bacteria inside animal cells that extract energy from sugars and oxygen (they metabolise for us). Termites in Darwin, Australia (known as Darwins termites) don't digest their own food. That's done by prokaryotes in their gut, which themselves are crowded with other tiny critters that do most of their work (propulsion is done by one set of bacteria which are powered by another group).

    For an accessible introduction to this kind of symbiosis, see The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life by Richard Dawkins.

    • What's new is that someone has recognized that this fits the definition of a superorganism and pointed it out. I think it's somewhat interesting, but it's kind of obvious to anyone who hasn't taken their biology classes too seriously.

  • yay (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ShadowXOmega ( 808299 )
    mmmmm
    May be that theory of James Lovelock (dont remember the name..heehe) (earth as Gaia) looks like an very early version of this....

    mmmm or may be all the life in earth are nano-machine (dna-machines) based ...mmmm natural nanites......

    DNA: main program, HDD, and protein sequencer(no ST stuff)
    Protein: main nanite assembly block , maked by DNA(read DNA)
    Virus: all purpose nano-machines, maded by proteins (read Protein)
    Organels: purpose-based nanite based in protein
    Bacteria: structure based in orga
  • Microbes in the gut can weigh up to one kilogram, forming the second largest metabolic 'organ'.

    This is a poorly phrased reference to "the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts."

    Or maybe I'm the only person who went "What the- ?"

    Jon Acheson
    • Or maybe I'm the only person who went "What the- ?"

      yeah man, i was like 'whoa, what was that' and it moved, and i'm all 'damn, gotta stop reading slashdot immediately', and it was all .. *bfrr-qfrrrrt* .. just a fart.

      close though! i thought i'd suddenly become host to a sentinent ball of microbe!

  • Not a bio guy or anything (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kippy ( 416183 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @09:49AM (#10503300)
    but don't a lot of other critters like dogs, whales, birds, skunks, sloths, etc, etc, etc, entail a system of bacteria and symbiotic lifeforms? Wouldn't this just mean that most complex life could be classified as superorganisms under this thinking?
    • You are absolutely correct, but mordern perception has us seperated from the rest of the animal kingdom for some strange reason. It's not "politically correct" (WTF is that anyhow?) to refer to someone as an ANIMAL unless to imply something negative. I imagine that all of the other critters are insulted by us!

    • Wouldn't this just mean that most complex life could be classified as superorganisms under this thinking?

      Yes, but I think superorganism simply means "an organism composed of several other (different) organisms".

      So it is more than an organism. But because your body is made up of these bacteria as well, you should feel a healthy respect for them instead of feeling like an overlord.

      Good thing that our brain doesn't rely on silicium yet but maybe it will one day. If you could connect dolphins and whales t

  • Powers (Score:4, Funny)

    by wed128 ( 722152 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @10:25AM (#10503597)
    So Wait...if i'm a superorganism...what kind of super powers do i have? do i use them for good, or for awesome?

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @10:38AM (#10503698) Homepage
    Finally! A scientific explanation for all those voices in my head.

  • I wonder if we are conscious as individuals or the product of some Emergent Behavior [wikipedia.org]?

    Kind if gives me the creeps...
  • We are Human. Resistance is futile.

  • Superorganism (Score:5, Interesting)

    by delta_avi_delta ( 813412 ) <dave.murphyNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @11:08AM (#10503982)
    I think the point is this new way of thinking opens the door to medical treatments that take into account our unicellular friends. For example, as someone pointed out, when you get sick, the traditional response has been to dose you with antibiotics, which kill *all* the bacteria in your gut.
    Lately researchers have discovered a link between gut bacteria and the immune system, suggesting that gut bacteria somehow "teach" the immune system to ignore things like pollen, thus preventing allergies. If you nuke these bacteria as part of a stomach bug treatment, it's important to replace them - and this is new to mecical thinking. In the future we may follow up a course of antibiotics with a course of probiotics to compensate.
    • It's not new. Years ago, when prescribed antibiotics, I was advised to eat yogurt. Yogurt, of course (real yogurt, not that sugary slime sold by Dannon et al) is full of beneficial live bacteria, which is supposed to help replace the intestinal bacteria killed by the antibiotics. This in turn was supposed to help avoid some of the intestinal side effects of antibiotics, such as diarrhea.

      Now, I don't know whether the bacteria in yogurt actually help replace those in the gut, or whether yogurt contains e

  • Why yes... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Idarubicin ( 579475 ) on Tuesday October 12, 2004 @11:47AM (#10504358) Journal
    I am a super organism. Thank you for noticing.

    You're not a bad organism, yourself.

  • Coincidentally, I'm listening to Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, a bio-thriller touching on related concepts. A very good book so far, but it is difficult to get out of the car for work.

  • Lynn Margulis' Research (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jte ( 707188 )
    Am I the only one suprised not to see the microbiologist Lynn Margulis' name mentioned here?
    • Yeah, good point, I was somewhat surprised too. I should have mentioned her in my post, actually- endosymbiosis, which I did mention, is her idea, and along with James Lovelock, so is the Gaia Hypothesis (which admittedly I'm less hot on). The idea of complex organisms as "superorganisms" in symbiosis with their own ecosystem of microbes fits nicely in scale between her two major ideas, one of which is about the relationship between a cell and some of its organelles and the other of which is about the rel
      • Margulis wrote a great article in Sci Am a few years back about Kefir, which intrigued me because I was cultivating it at the time. Kefir is a 'superorganism' comprised of some >30 different microbes, yeasts and bacteria et al., and when they're together they make a nice small rubbery grain that's coherent and lasts. This stuff does amazing things to milk, transforming it into a very digestible, healthful drink for humans. When conditions are bad, Kefir dissolves into its constituent parts and they just
  • Here's a real good reason for strictist privacy concerning individual and family medical records - with this kind of technology, not only is "personalized medicine," a possibility, but also "personalized illness." Imagine what you could do with a virus that *only* afflicted one person. It's kinda scary.
  • Waits for the inevitable mention of midichlorians...
  • ... thanks for asking!
  • From The Fifth Element.

    Police : Are you classified as human?
    Korben Dallas : Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

  • Nature Biochemistry Article Text (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nature Biotechnology 22, 1268 - 1274 (2004)
    Published online: 06 October 2004; | doi:10.1038/nbt1015
    The challenges of modeling mammalian biocomplexity
    Jeremy K Nicholson1, Elaine Holmes1, John C Lindon1 & Ian D Wilson2
    1 Biological Chemistry, Biomedical Sciences Division, Imperial College London, Sir Alexander Fleming Building, South Kensington, London SW7 2AZ, UK.

    2 Dept. of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals, Mereside, Alderley Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK10 4TG, UK.

    Co

  • Rats (Score:1)

    by Boronx ( 228853 )
    Wasn't there an experiment done where they raised a bunch of rats without any bacterial colonization at all, no flora in the gut, and the rats lived longer and were healthier?

    Are you sure we're not just swamped with parasites?

  • "You are not completely human"

    Perhaps not the news that can make my day!

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