A Bitter Pill. By Arielle Duhaime- Ross . A bottle of ethyl alcohol, an electronic scale, test tubes, and a stack of well- worn pots and pans lay nearby. The stove light illuminated the area as Josiah Zayner crushed the shit with a pestle, creating a brownish- yellow sludge. It was probably vegetables — .
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He was clad in a Wu- Tang Clan T- shirt, jeans, and white socks and sandals. Adult Dating Site For Cheaters more. At his feet, James Baxter, Zayner’s one- eyed orange cat, rubbed its flank against its owner’s legs.
The kitchen smelled like an outhouse in a busy campground. Over the course of the next four days, Zayner would attempt to eradicate the trillions of microbes that lived on and inside his body — organisms that helped him digest food, produce vitamins and enzymes, and protected his body from other, more dangerous bacteria. Ruthlessly and methodically, he would try to render himself into a biological blank slate. Then, he would inoculate himself with a friend’s microbes — a procedure he refers to as a . As such, it can be worn, mended, and replaced. The suit he was living with, he said, was faulty, leaving him with severe gastrointestinal pain. A new suit could solve all that.
There was no evidence to suggest it would work, though there was a real risk it could make Zayner life- threateningly sick. That didn’t bother him. Zayner unwrapped a brand- new syringe and filled its barrel with the brownish liquid.
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He grabbed one half of a gelatin capsule, pushed the syringe’s plunger, and filled the capsule with the fecal slurry in inconsistent spurts. Frustrated, he removed the needle and pushed the plunger again, letting clumpy muck accumulate in the half capsule. But by the time he joined both ends of the pill, the gelatin casing had begun deteriorating in his gloved hands. But the thought disgusted him, and instead he opened a kitchen drawer and grabbed an inoculating loop, an instrument used by microbiologists to sample microorganisms.
He dipped it into the large, poop- filled Ziploc bag on the counter. The unadulterated shit had a frosting- like texture and didn’t eat through the gelatin; the pill held up. Exhausted from his most recent dose of antibiotics, Zayner took a break. Tomorrow, in a hotel room near the San Francisco International Airport, he planned to start his transformation. Zayner is a punk: his ears are adorned with a row of 1.
The haircut, the piercings, and most of the tattoos he did himself. He doesn’t trust others with these tasks, he says. This is a running theme in Zayner’s life.
As a child, Zayner rarely saw doctors — his family, he says, was too poor to pay for visits. Then in college, he got health insurance and finally started going; gastrointestinal pain was making it hard for him to lead a normal life. He was pooping more than four times a day, and severe . The doctors visits were expensive and ineffective, he says, and over time, Zayner grew suspicious of physicians. In 2. 01. 3, he earned a Ph. D in Biophysics from the University of Chicago and subsequently served as a postdoc researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center for two years.
But the space agency didn’t suit him. It was supposed to be a bastion of innovation, but the experiments he saw performed at NASA were underwhelming. Today, The ODIN has four employees who work out of Zayner’s garage.
Sustained by orders from schools and hobbyists, The ODIN is doing well, Zayner says: he expects the company’s revenue to reach somewhere between $5. On weekends he sometimes teaches free classes on genetic engineering in public lab spaces around San Francisco. In our conversations, Zayner stressed to me the importance of breaking science out of labs and classrooms and making it available to the wider public. Zayner generally has to defecate two to three times before starting his workday, and also after every meal. He claims to have ulcers and irritable bowel syndrome, but he’s a bit hazy on the details of his diagnoses.
When pressed, he admits that he doesn't remember what his physician told him in college — he could have IBS or inflammatory bowel disease. And a search through his medical records is inconclusive.
So at 3. 5, Zayner decided to dive into one of science’s most foolhardy traditions: self- experimentation. Some of his predecessors have achieved great things. In 1. 98. 4, Nobel winner Barry James Marshall ingested a species of bacteria to demonstrate their role in causing ulcers. He was, to his discomfort, proven correct. Other ventures have been less successful. In 1. 90. 0, an American physician by the name of Jesse Lazear intentionally submitted himself to bites from yellow fever- infected mosquitoes in an effort to learn about the virus’ transmission. Three decades later, Russian physician Alexander Bogdanov performed multiple blood transfusions on himself to deduce whether the procedure would keep him eternally young.
It didn’t — the experiment killed him. Across cultures, human feces are reviled. Shit stinks, yes, but that’s not actually why it’s gross — thanks to its bacterial load, it’s a disease vector that causes outbreaks of cholera, typhoid fever, and E. But humans didn’t truly figure that out until the 1. So, for a long time, shit was actually used by some as medicine. The Ebers Papyrus, a document from Ancient Egypt dating back to 1.
BC, contains more than 5. In the 4th century, a well- known traditional Chinese doctor described using a suspension of human feces to help patients with food poisoning or severe diarrhea. And in the 1. 7th century, an Italian anatomist named Fabricius ab Aquapendente was using shit to treat gastrointestinal diseases in veterinary medicine. The first modern fecal matter transplant didn’t take place until the mid- 2. In 1. 95. 8, an American surgeon named Ben Eiseman performed enemas on four pseudomembranous colitis patients. Eiseman suspected that a treatment of antibiotics had killed off natural gut bacteria, leading to severe cases of diarrhea.
So, instead of flushing their colons with water alone, he used shit from healthy patients. Perhaps, he figured, reintroducing normal intestinal bacteria into the guts of patients whose digestive system had been wiped out would heal them. But by the late . And antibiotics, used more and more often in American health care, were triggering more and more cases of C. Fecal matter transplants, or FMTs — the procedure that Egyptian and Chinese doctors used long before Eiseman — suddenly made a comeback.
Though enemas and nasal operations are still performed, the most publicized FMT procedure involves taking pills filled with the feces of another healthier individual. Because shit is considered a medicine when it’s administered by a doctor, the procedure is strictly regulated by the US government, and is only available to patients with recurrent C.
And in truth, the restriction has a lot do with the fact that scientists don’t yet understand why the treatment works, or how it affects patients in the long- term. But evidence suggests the benefits can be great: the Mayo Clinic’s campus in Phoenix reports that 9. C. And the transplants can work fast. Internet Dating Cape Town more. But given his condition, replacing his gut bacteria sounded like a possible solution.
The operation Zayner envisioned, however, would involve more than a simple fecal matter transplant; instead he would also alter the bacterial composition of his nose, mouth, arms, and skin — his entire exterior. He’d been thinking about full- body microbiome transfers for a while: in August 2. Eventually, a skin microbiome expert told me that the closest thing scientists had done in adults was to transfer bacteria from one site of the body to another. In that instance, a bacterial transplant from the study participants’ tongues to their forearms held up well eight hours later, but a transfer of tongue bacteria to participants’ foreheads didn’t. The researchers obtained similar results when they attempted the same, small transfers between different volunteers. Other research has been done on inoculating children born through C- section with their mothers’ vaginal bacteria. But I found no mention of an adult ever trying to kill all the bacteria on their skin in order to permanently replace them with that of another human being.
Every single professional stressed that Zayner’s experiment could make him very sick. The lack of precedent meant that few experts were willing to discuss the bacterial skin transfer Zayner was suggesting. One biologist did agree to talk — and she wasn’t impressed. Changing the skin’s microbiome is . Of the nine biology and medical professionals I spoke with, every single one stressed that Zayner’s experiment could make him very sick. Zayner vowed not to analyze his donor’s feces — it contradicted, he said, the DIY ethos of the experiment and could make the project seem less accessible to laypeople.
As a result, he was putting himself at risk for hepatitis, rotavirus, and a whole slew of other pathogens and parasites. And his decision to take antibiotics to kill his own bacteria before the transplant was risky, said Open. Biome’s Osman. Some people carry C.
Hohmann added that Zayner’s experiment was ultimately . Then, at the end of January, he booked three nights at a hotel just south of the San Francisco Airport. The Crowne Plaza sits along Highway 1. San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The hotel is a dated and dreary place, decorated in a depressing blend of beiges and browns. A hotel room is not a sterile environment for the sort of operation Zayner envisioned, but it was better than his home, where traces of his microbiome could be found in his sheets, his bathroom, his kitchen, his front doorknob.
Zayner’s next challenge was finding a donor. Everyone he’d spoken to had either turned him down or backed out citing the risks involved. Michael knew people with gastrointestinal tract problems, and he thought Zayner’s experiment could help him. So Michael agreed to poop in a Ziploc bag, and have the skin on his arms, legs, the inside of nose, and his mouth swabbed twice.