Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Tools for Understanding Well-Being Ecosystems
Popular Science has a great article examining the future of understanding health ecosystems. As the story's author Virginia Hughes describes it, scientists are now beginning to map out the bacteria--good and bad--that cluster on different people in different parts of the body, and are learning to think of an individual's health state as part of a broader relationship with bacteria. You are a health ecosystem, in other words.
Hughes' article focuses largely on research coming out of the NIH's Human Microbiome project, a human genome type project designed as "an effort to characterize the thousands of species of microbes that live on or in us." Hughes article, which is really worth reading in full, traces this story through a child named Jake who has asthma and eczema, and uses this as a lens for exploring some of the emerging research in human-microbe ecosystems.
Some 34.1 million Americans suffer from asthma, and up to 50 million
have seasonal allergies.
“In the last three decades, all of these allergic disorders—asthma,
eczema, hay fever—they’ve all tripled,” [Dr.] Segre says. With that short of a time frame, the culprit can’t be simply changes in our own genome. “So it must be something about the gene-environment interaction. And I now believe that that’s modulated by the body’s bacteria.”
Hughes points to several other key shifts to thinking of people as ecosystems. Among them:
- With microbial ecosystems, the problem (often) isn't a particularly malicious bacteria; the problem may be an imbalance.
- Regarding skin as an ecosystem, and ecosystems in general, she writes: "The skin is an ecosystem. Like any other ecosystem, it harbors permanent residents and also migrant species that flock to a few hotspots during certain seasons. Those fluctuations powerfully influence how the skin works."
- And critically, bacteria near each other are "highly dependent on each other for survival" as a genetics researcher at the University of Maryland told Hughes. Put differently, these bacteria depend on each other, in much the same way that we depend on their balance for our health.
I was particularly struck by Hughes' article in light of a couple aspects of our research at IFTF including our research this year into the future of ecosystems of well-being as well as our interest in high resolution futures.
One of the most interesting features of high-resolution tools is the ways in which they can cross scales. For example, the concept of the human microbiome - of measuring and understanding not just our genes but the genes of the bacteria on our bodies - involves incredibly high-resolution tools for understanding individual health. At the same time, many of these same tools are being to use in projects like the bio weathermap and disease weather map aimed at regularly sampling and sequencing bacterial and virus samples from all over the world to build a global map. The thinking is that this regular sampling could offer us a much better early warning system about the potential for a pandemic to hit a specific place.
And, of course, we - people - find ourselves trying to navigate and make sense of health and well-being somewhere in between the bacteria on our bodies and the large-scale environments that surround us. Navigating this space means not just thinking about bacterial systems--at large or small scales--but thinking about social systems, food systems and all sorts of other factors that influence how we understand and seek out health and well-being.
Like microbial ecosystems, in other words, we depend on each other for health and well-being. We face long-term challenges and are exposed, seemingly fleetingly, to influences that can reshape our health.
It wouldn't be possible to measure all of the potential connections in our health ecosystems. But fortunately, I don't think that's the challenge. Rather, the challenge is to begin to use these high-resolution tools to make some manageable sense of the different connections that influence health and well-being, while also recognizing that we won't be able to understand all of them.