I can still remember the shock I felt when I heard about fecal microbiota transplants for the first time. It is not the sort of thing you forget. At a microbiology conference, a scientist was giving a lecture about the microbiome–the microbes that live harmlessly inside of us. She described one unusual case she was involved in where a doctor named Alexander Khoruts used the microbiome to save a patient’s life. The patient had taken antibiotics for a lung infection.
While the drugs cleared that infection, they also disrupted the ecology of her gut, allowing a life-threatening species of bacteria called Clostridium difficile to take over. The pathogen was causing horrific levels of diarrhea. Khoruts couldn’t stop it, because it was resistant to every antibiotic he tried. So Khoruts decided to use an obscure method: the fecal transplant. He took some stool from the patient’s husband,…
