The hordes of microbes inside your body are your friends
April 25, 2013
As tools for engineering life’s building blocks have proliferated in recent years, our definition of human life has become more expansive. For example, we are learning that the vast ecosystems of microbes inside our bodies are as integral to our health as our own tissues, affecting everything from our immune systems to our brain chemistry. Meanwhile, the field of biology itself keeps expanding—see, for example, synthetic biology, the new subfield that uses the combined insights of molecular biology, engineering, and chemistry to construct biological parts and processes. (The Atlantic)
