Neo Life
Art Direction: Nick Vokey
“In biotech, there’s a new kind of asset. Medical breakthroughs usually start out in a research lab, then are painstakingly evaluated in rounds of heavily regulated testing before arriving in the pharmacy or doctor’s office. Fecal transplants, an old DIY practice, exploded onto the medical scene around 10 years ago with the help of a more dubious source: word of mouth on the Internet — a place where most health advice truly belongs in the toilet. The idea that anyone would want to insert someone else’s excrement in their own body is undeniably gross. But the practice spread for good reason. Fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs) delivered healthy bacteria that often curedrecurrent Clostridium difficile, a very dangerous gut infection that defies antibiotics. Desperate patients suffering from these infections spread the gospel — trading advice, making instructional videos, the works. The method could be done with an at-home enema — no doctors involved — but increasingly, doctors were also paying attention. They began testing whether it really worked as well as it seemed to — and they began worrying about potential side effects, which could range from inadvertently passing along other infections, to weirder consequences such as inexplicable weight gain in people who received FMT from obese donors.”
October 2018