It's not what it looks like. It lives in what it looks like If there is anyplace this column likes to be on top of, it is the latest developments in science. Mostly I concentrate on two scientific fields--science that holds out hope for longer, healthier lives for most of us, and also science that predicts the entire human race is doomed to violent extinction. This post is about the former. It seems that fecal transplant technology is a movement that cannot be stopped. Many modern illnesses are now thought to be caused by their victims having insufficiently hard-working digestive tract bacteria, and if your intestinal bugs are defective, there is only one way to get someone else's.
I say this because of my recent perusal of an article in the December 1st issue of the New Yorker. Titled "The Excrement Experiment," the article not only touts the virtues of virtual coprophagia in the treatment of all gastrointestinal disorders, but makes public the existence of a gray market in medicinal feces. The project, Open Biome, described by the magazine as a "non-profit stool bank" currently ships to 36 states for the purpose of life-giving fecal transplants. And they need donors. They want to buy your stools, for forty bucks a poop. For me, a person gifted with a life of regularity in the elimination field, this gives a whole new meaning to the expression "flushed away a fortune."
The stool bank obtains its donations just like a sperm bank, by giving its contributors a magazine and a bathroom. Open Biome does have a sense of humor about itself. It gives its regular donors not only numbers, but cute nicknames like Winnie the Poo and Albutt Einstein. The article does not say if the nicknames are racially coded, i.e., donors of color being given noms de merde like Kanye Flush or Dr. Martin Pooter King, Jr. Perhaps that would be considered politically incorrect, for one thing that is made clear by science is that all poo is brown. In fact, researchers have gone to Mother Africa, the continent of our evolution, in search of the perfect fece, on the theory that the most curative lumps would be found there, in tribal toilets, produced by humans who still live as hunter gatherers, a poo product unaffected by civilization's discontents, which these researchers think are white bread and antibiotics. And they found them, pieces of crap still crawling with the gut bacteria of Eden.
Unfortunately, they cannot bring it all back and let us all partake of it, because transplanted poo, like all transplanted organs, must be installed fresh. This has temporarily stalled my career as donor, as Open Biome is in Massachusetts and I live in San Diego. I just don't think that these poo pioneers can ignore the untapped potential of the San Diego field for long. We San Diego producers are obsessed with fresh vegetables, free-range anything and the many delicious frijole dishes prepared by our Mexican neighbors. Our feces are bound to be free-flowing and firm textured in contrast with East Coast poop, which is composed mostly of pizza crust and hoagies, or biscuit-and-gravy infused Southern stools.
I can hardly wait to start making poopies for profit, because I need the money. And while fece donors are tested for the medical usefulness of their specimens, I feel confident mine will pass. I have mentioned my opinion of their quality previously here, and once Open Biome screens my stool, I'll be entered proudly on the roster that many have already mentally placed me.
The shit list.
I say this because of my recent perusal of an article in the December 1st issue of the New Yorker. Titled "The Excrement Experiment," the article not only touts the virtues of virtual coprophagia in the treatment of all gastrointestinal disorders, but makes public the existence of a gray market in medicinal feces. The project, Open Biome, described by the magazine as a "non-profit stool bank" currently ships to 36 states for the purpose of life-giving fecal transplants. And they need donors. They want to buy your stools, for forty bucks a poop. For me, a person gifted with a life of regularity in the elimination field, this gives a whole new meaning to the expression "flushed away a fortune."
The stool bank obtains its donations just like a sperm bank, by giving its contributors a magazine and a bathroom. Open Biome does have a sense of humor about itself. It gives its regular donors not only numbers, but cute nicknames like Winnie the Poo and Albutt Einstein. The article does not say if the nicknames are racially coded, i.e., donors of color being given noms de merde like Kanye Flush or Dr. Martin Pooter King, Jr. Perhaps that would be considered politically incorrect, for one thing that is made clear by science is that all poo is brown. In fact, researchers have gone to Mother Africa, the continent of our evolution, in search of the perfect fece, on the theory that the most curative lumps would be found there, in tribal toilets, produced by humans who still live as hunter gatherers, a poo product unaffected by civilization's discontents, which these researchers think are white bread and antibiotics. And they found them, pieces of crap still crawling with the gut bacteria of Eden.
Unfortunately, they cannot bring it all back and let us all partake of it, because transplanted poo, like all transplanted organs, must be installed fresh. This has temporarily stalled my career as donor, as Open Biome is in Massachusetts and I live in San Diego. I just don't think that these poo pioneers can ignore the untapped potential of the San Diego field for long. We San Diego producers are obsessed with fresh vegetables, free-range anything and the many delicious frijole dishes prepared by our Mexican neighbors. Our feces are bound to be free-flowing and firm textured in contrast with East Coast poop, which is composed mostly of pizza crust and hoagies, or biscuit-and-gravy infused Southern stools.
I can hardly wait to start making poopies for profit, because I need the money. And while fece donors are tested for the medical usefulness of their specimens, I feel confident mine will pass. I have mentioned my opinion of their quality previously here, and once Open Biome screens my stool, I'll be entered proudly on the roster that many have already mentally placed me.
The shit list.
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