Chief Compliance Officer, American International Group
We are not alone: The depths of the human superorganism | Karen Nelson | TEDxIEMadrid
Dr. Karen Nelson will introduce you to the Microbiome. Having evolved with mammal and human species for millions of years and helping us create the intricate system taht is the human body, or better, the human Microbiome, this environment of complexity implies a re-evolution of the way we approach significant matters such as medicine and public health. Dr. Karen Nelson is a Jamaican-born American microbiologist noted for her research on Thermotoga maritima at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) which demonstrated the existence of horizontal gene transfer. Her team published the rst ever...
About Karen Nelson
Karen Nelson, a microbiologist and professor, has given talks on the human microbiome and attention research. In a 2018 TEDx talk, she described microorganisms as essential to human survival, noting that they account for more than half of Earth's biomass and reside in extreme environments. She stated that she sequenced the first human microbiome and discussed how microbes in the gut, skin, and oral cavity educate the immune system and are being investigated for correlations with diseases such as autism and schizophrenia. Nelson also mentioned that microbial signatures are being used in forensics to trace the origin of human trafficking victims and that commercial endeavors are using these signatures for new diagnostic approaches. In a 2020 talk, Nelson presented findings from a three-year study on attention, conducted through her commercial business that builds technology for data collection. She argued that traditional advertising impressions do not capture visibility or attention, and that attention varies considerably between platforms due to differences in screen coverage. Nelson advocated for a change in advertising currency, stating that low visibility can affect whether a brand is seen, and that time on screen helps attention even if the viewer does not look directly at the ad. She also noted that attention and memory are not the same thing, and that distinctive assets like colors and logos should be placed at higher attention peaks.
Transcript (8 segments)
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Karen Nelson0:12
This morning, okay, that's 99%, that's a good start. How many of you think you're a superorganism? All right, we'll get there. And how many of you have heard of fecal transplants? Okay, you need microbiology here in the programs at this university. So anyway, let's talk about microbiology today a little bit more. Most of you might not realize that microorganisms inhabit everywhere, everything you touch. When you came in the room today, you're probably covered in the bacteria that the person beside you just coughed all over you. Everybody you shook hands with, you're carrying their signatures. No smiling faces anymore.
We're looking at spacecraft, we're looking at airplanes, we're looking at acid leaks, alkaline lakes, you name it, for microbial species. And we know they're essential to our survival and our wellness. My analogy for thinking about microbial species in general is looking at dark matter and what happened when we started to explore space. I remember when I was a little girl and we had five planets. I know I'm dating myself; everybody thinks I'm like 21 years old. But when I was a kid, we were told that there are five planets and there were five domains of life. Now we know that's absolutely not true. We know that there's a lot to be learned, and we're still exploring and learning more on a daily basis. To me, microbiology is essentially just like that. Once we started developing new technologies that allowed us to look at the microbes on the planet, we have sequencing technologies whereby we are able to look at all the genetic information of these microbes and understand what they're able to do. Most of you have only heard about E. coli, but there's a lot more out there than just E. coli. There are bad bugs and good bugs, and I want to talk to you about the good bugs because the majority of them really are good bugs.
Now, what we have learned over the last 10 to 12 years, and one of my biggest claims to fame is that I sequenced the first human microbiome. How many of you have heard that word before? Show of hands. This is pretty bad. So this refers to the millions of microbial species that live in and on the human body, and essentially live in your oral cavity. As much as you try to get rid of them, they're there for a purpose. They rapidly start to populate our bodies after we are born. Do you give birth? They stay with us through life, and they're central for metabolizing plant compounds. All you vegetarians in the audience, you could not live without the microbial species in your GI tract. And all of you who have acne probably have a little problem with your friendly microbial species that are out of whack. From here on out, I'll refer to the term as dysbiosis. So mainly, your normal population of microbes that inhabits your body gets out of whack, and you develop some kind of unhealthy signature. It could be diarrhea, it could be acne.
Where we're looking at microbiomes that are associated with human health, we're not saying that microbes cause these diseases. We're not saying microbes cause colon cancer, we're not saying they cause oral cancer, we're not saying they cause fatty liver disease. By studying large cohorts of people, we're able to see correlations between the microbes and these diseases that suggests there is some relationship there. The field is still very young, and we're trying to get a better understanding of what exactly these microbes do and why they're so important for health and disease conditions. Again, I mentioned the word dysbiosis. So if you don't take anything away from my talk today, because I know we're not all microbiologists in the audience here, the correlations with microbes that live in and on us, we know that keeping the microbes in your GI tract healthy is very important for disease prevention. We know that there are huge commercial endeavors springing up globally to start using these microbial signatures associated with the human body in the development of new diagnostic approaches to diseases. Also, we think that this whole field of human microbiome research is going to push this concept of personalized health. One thing you'll all also learn in this field is that no two people in this audience have the same exact microbiome. So we have differences even within this population. When you start going to other parts of the world...
The Hadza, who live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, so basically they're still out foraging for their food. When you look at the microbiomes of these people, they're actually more similar to the microbiomes of non-human primates compared to when you look at agriculturalists who have exposure to processed foods and antibiotics and prophylactic treatments, where their microbiome starts to look closer to hamburger eaters, people who reside in the West. We're not saying that one is worse than the other, but we're using these signatures associated with lifestyle to understand how the microbiome has evolved to be a signature within the human body, and seeing these really interesting correlations.
Bathrooms, y'all just went in, and we heard the talk earlier about algae. So we know that we flush them out routinely. But things like looking at pieces of art: I'm a member of a team called the Leonardo Research Project, where we're trying to understand microbes that are associated with very ancient pieces of art. Can you look at an ancient piece of art and look at a fingerprint and actually trace to see who the fingerprint came from, how long the fingerprint has been on that piece of art? Can you look at communities that have assembled on pieces of art to see if they were stolen from somebody's house? So we're actually using microbial studies to look in forensics. We're trying to look at microbes in terms of understanding how new pathogens emerge. All of you have heard about new pathogenic species that are cropping up.
From this genetic information from various samples, we're trying to start getting an understanding of how organisms evolved and are actually able to travel from one place to another. The last thing that I want to mention in terms of the value of looking at microbial species outside of just looking at the human gut is in the field of forensics. Now we're in discussions about looking at microbial signatures on hair and in stool from human trafficking victims or young kids who can't speak or tell you who their parents are or what country they are in. You could probably look at the microbial signature associated with their body and trace which country they had been in within the last 30 to 60 days as a result of these microbes.
And I'm not sure where I fall. I hope I'm complex, just based on some of the images I saw today. It's amazing to think that organisms that are so tiny and so simple, we can't even see them with the naked eye, are in fact really complex, really smart. If you think about it, they figured out how to survive by rapidly populating offspring. They figured out how to dominate any environment that you look at, and they figured out how to ensure their survival even though we try repeatedly to get rid of them, especially on a daily basis. Just think about exploration of this dark matter called microbial species and our own human microbiome next time you try to wash everything off your hands in your space. So with closing, I'll leave that thought.