Science, we are told, advances one funeral at a time1, but sometimes it progresses through resurrections.
The French chemist Antoine Béchamp (1816–1908) was a
life-long rival to the great microbiologist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur invented pasteurization and vaccines for rabies and anthrax and discovered that many diseases are caused by invisible germs. Béchamp was a bitter crank who argued that microbes became dangerous when the health of the host—its “terrain” or environment—deteriorated. Béchamp was comprehensively wrong: Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, which describes how sicknesses are caused by bacterial infections (as well as by viruses that invade our cells), or else by genetics, aging, and accidents, is supported by evolutionary theory and all the observations of modern medicine. Today, Béchamp is invoked only by
anti-vaxxersand
disciples of alternative medicine who believe that food is medicine.
Béchamp was comprehensively wrong, but not absolutely so. His idea that microorganisms are necessary to good health, and that beneficial microbiota are pathogenic under the wrong conditions or in the wrong place, is now the standard view of researchers who study the microbiology of animals and plants. A new science of the microbiome—meaning, simply, the microorganisms in an environment—emphasizes that all plants and animals on Earth evolved in combination with microorganisms and asks how microbiota interact with their hosts. Over the last 17 years, we have learnt that countless functions in living things, from digesting food to regulating the immune system to germinating seeds, rely on microorganisms. More recently still, microbiome science has attracted
huge sums of venture capital to fund companies that treat hitherto intractable diseases or swell agricultural yields. (Disclosure: Flagship Pioneering, where I am a partner, has created several microbiome companies in therapeutics and agriculture.)
What changed?
