Who are we?

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Efforts to catalogue and understand the human microbiome are opening up a whole new research frontier. But the earlier Human Genome Project should provide a cautionary lesson about overselling.

“Who am I?” is a question that is often asked and seldom answered. But as several articles in this issue suggest, the question itself may need to be reframed: biologists are discovering that it is frequently more informative to ask, “Who are we?”

Don't oversell the human microbiome until its medical promise has been established.

The 'we' refers to the wild profusion of bacteria, fungi and viruses that colonize the human body. These unseen passengers number in the trillions. According to one common estimate, the human gut contains at least a kilogram of bacteria alone. They contribute so much to human biology that it is difficult to say where the body ends and the microbes begin — which is why several massive projects have now started up to characterize the human microbiota in its entirety (see page 578).

Microbiologists are understandably excited by this opportunity. So, too, are the food and pharmaceutical industries. When it comes to profitable applications to human health, the microbiome could well offer distinct advantages over the more famous genome. Human genes are notoriously difficult and risky to tamper with. But, in theory at least, the microbiome should be relatively easy to change by the selective addition or removal of bacterial species, or by altering their genetic components. This idea has some basis. Antibiotics and 'probiotic' foods have already been shown to calm inflammatory bowel diseases in some instances. In this issue, for example, researchers show how intestinal inflammation can be reduced by a single molecule produced by a gut bacterium (see pages 602 and 620). And there is increasing acceptance that certain foods, or the bacteria contained in them, can alter gut microbiota in ways that are beneficial to health in general.

The new appreciation of the microbiome comes just as some observers have started to question whether the human genome can deliver on its once-hyped promises to tackle disease. To take just one example, anyone so inclined can now pay genetic-testing companies for a preliminary rundown of the genetic variations associated with his or her risk of developing cancer, obesity and other conditions. But the risks identified are often so low or unclear that people are questioning whether the information will actually prompt the changes in health behaviour, such as losing weight, that could make them valuable (see page 570).

For all the excitement, however, researchers involved in the human microbiome efforts can learn a valuable lesson from the genome experience. Simply put: be circumspect. Don't oversell the human microbiome until its medical promise has been established. Remember that the understanding of these microbial communities is still fragmentary, at best — and that it is far from established that the microbiota can be radically altered without upsetting the balance and causing harm, or that any alterations will last more than a few months. Indeed, attempts to understand the dynamics of gut colonization are still in their infancy (see page 581).

In the meantime, microbiologists should celebrate their quest to map, catalogue and understand the human microbiome for the inspiring saga it is. Certainly there is food for thought in the fact that everyone has inside them exotic environments that support communities as diverse as any rainforest. There is a unique ecological perspective on food itself, and the effects that different foodstuffs, such as processed versus unprocessed ones, have on these environments.

There is a compelling new take on humankind's place in the world — a realization that “Who am I?” cannot be fully answered until it is fully understood who 'we' are.

“That’s not who we are.” So said President Obama, again and again throughout his administration, in speeches urging Americans to side with him against the various outrages perpetrated by Republicans. And now so say countless liberals, urging their fellow Americans to reject the exclusionary policies and America-first posturing of President Donald Trump.

The problem with this rhetorical line is that it implicitly undercuts itself. If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.

This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.

The exclusion happens by omission, in the course of telling a story about America that’s powerful but incomplete. In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions — a nation of immigrants drawn to Ellis Island, a nation of minorities claiming rights too long denied, a universal nation destined to welcome foreigners and defend liberty abroad.

Given this story’s premises, saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended. Thus our national religion isn’t anything specific, but we know it’s not-Protestant and not-Judeo-Christian. Our national culture is not-Anglo-Saxon, not-European; the prototypical American is not-white, not-male, not-heterosexual. We don’t know what the American future is, but we know it’s not-the-past.

But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms. Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native po[CENSORED]tion rather than coexisting with it.

As late as the 1960s, liberalism as well as conservatism identified with these particularisms, and with a national narrative that honored and included them. The exhortations of civil rights activists assumed a Christian moral consensus. Liberal intellectuals linked the New Deal and the Great Society to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Pop-culture utopians projected “Wagon Train” into the future as “Star Trek.”

Then for a variety of reasons — a necessary reckoning with white supremacism, a new and diverse wave of immigration, the pull of a more globalist ethos, the waning of institutional religion — that mid-century story stopped making as much sense. In its place emerged a left-wing narrative that stands in judgment on the racist-misogynist-robber baron past, and a mainstream liberal narrative that has room for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton (as opposed to the slightly more Trumpish genuine article) and Emma Lazarus, but feels unsure about the rest.

But meanwhile for a great many Americans the older narrative still feels like the real history. They still see themselves more as settlers than as immigrants, identifying with the Pilgrims and the Founders, with Lewis and Clark and Davy Crockett and Laura Ingalls Wilder. They still embrace the Iliadic mythos that grew up around the Civil War, prefer the melting pot to multiculturalism, assume a Judeo-Christian civil religion rather the “spiritual but not religious” version.

Trump’s ascent is, in part, an attempt to restore their story to pre-eminence. It’s a restoration attempt that can’t succeed, because the country has changed too much, and because that national narrative required correction. The myth of the “Lost Cause” had to die, the reality of racial wrongs required more acknowledgment, the Judeo-Christian center had to make room for a larger plurality of faiths.

But so far we haven’t found a way to correct the story while honoring its full sweep — including all the white-male-Protestant-European protagonists to whom, for all their sins, we owe so much of our inheritance.

Instead liberalism, under pressure from the left, has become steadily more anxious about its political and cultural progenitors, with Woodrow Wilson joining Jackson and Jefferson in the dock. Meanwhile the right’s narrative has become steadily more exclusionary — religious-conservative outreach to Muslims has given way to Islamophobia, racial optimism has been replaced by white resentment.

Maybe no unifying story is really possible. Maybe the gap between a heroic founders-and-settlers narrative and the truth about what befell blacks and Indians and others cannot be adequately bridged.

But any leader who wants to bury Trumpism (as opposed to just beating Trump) would need to reach for one — for a story about who we are and were, not just what we’re not, that the people who still believe in yesterday’s American story can recognize as their own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/who-are-we.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/453563a