seattle – Seattle Science Writer

Centrifuge – smashing science into theater

What happens when an actor has to keep putting on a skull-cap, in order to look bald, over and over? Audiences howled, as his errant hairs poked out, and he began his lines imitating Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame. The fake-Jeff was just one character in a set of five science plays. Each play only 10 minutes long and all of them part of a festival known as Centrifuge.

In other plays, reluctant astronauts hunted down life on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. Newlyweds obeyed the beeped warnings of Fitbits on their wrists predicting “argument” approaching, the way the silly robot of “Lost in space” kept saying “Aliens approaching.” A family hid in a bunker from the frightening reality of ordinary crowds of other people.

Besides a hilarious ribbing of both Bezos and space-exploration rival Elon Musk, a different dystopian play focused on overuse of the mood-enhancer ecstasy or MDMA. Writer Wayt Gibbs holds a model of that molecule above.

Centrifuge is a week-long improvisation between volunteers of two tribes – theater and science. David Mills and his wife, Catherine Kettrick, lead this project. Full disclosure – I was one of the science writers in May 2017.

You can’t predict what will happen as the week unfolds. With close to 30 people involved, who have full-time other jobs, plenty of obstacles show up. Pets get sick, relatives call, jobs demand. Randomness drives the schedule, just as in a lab where randomness divides mice into controls or experimental subjects.

Monday: Five science writers and five playwrights are randomly assigned to each other, leave the room in minutes and spend time talking in dyads about some research the science writer has brought in.

Wednesday: Five playwrights turn in roughly six-page scripts of new plays inspired by that talk. Actors, who wait for their names to be pulled from hats, are assigned to the five plays. They begin reading the scripts out loud with a randomly assigned director. As I watched, four actors began turning names into people – adding back stories and motivation to small gestures.

Just to shorten this a bit, by Friday the five plays, including 5-minute introductions about science by each writer, debut to the public. A lot of logistics – sets, costumes, lighting, sound and pacing get expertly handled by the theater tribe.

My playwright was Jim Jewell, whose full-time day job is teaching college students composition. The play he created in 48 hours was amazingly complex with four characters from a family. It was less about the gut microbiome research I described to him Monday, and more deeply about how people resist ideas. How might people react to knowing their bodies are more microbial colonizers than “self?” See my earlier post for more about microbiome.

Unlike science, no measurements are taken after this week of mixing. We didn’t examine the audience to rate their hilarity. We didn’t measure the science writers or playwrights to give them a 2 or an 8 in “inspiration.” But what might have changed in us?

I’m hoping Wayt, as well as Alan Boyle, Greg Scheiderer, and Elle O’Brien will tell me some of their musings on that question for a future post.

Man makes his microbes into research study

Richard Sprague keeps samples of his own feces, in the family freezer, so he can send them to a Stanford University laboratory. Some days he tries to improve his sleep by swallowing potato starch to feed a certain population of microbes in his gut. Lately, he’s been studying his brain acuity every morning to see if changes in his diet can influence it.

A 52-year-old father of three and an ex-Microsoft manager who lives on Mercer Island, Sprague is a volunteer, among thousands of others, in a movement called “citizen science.” Read more at Seattle Magazine.

Tiny invisible bosses

“We are bulky ornaments on life’s skin,

riding the surface, only dimly aware

of the microscopic multitudes

that make up the rest of the body,”

From the book, The Forest Unseen, by David Haskell.

Sometimes the scale of things makes all the difference. My microbes are invisible to my eyes, but increasingly important to how I “see” my own health and our collective public health.

My gradual change in thinking began a few years ago when I donated information from my home and my own body to two different research projects. One was the Ubiome project, which is mapping the microbes in thousands of human guts. The other was the Wild Life of our Homes project, which is mapping the microbes of homes in all 50 states in the United States.

For the Wild Life project, I used a swab that looked like an overgrown Q-tip to take samples from doorways and my kitchen counters and my pillow. I mailed that swab in a vial to the researchers. For the Ubiome project, I took a sample of feces from my toilet paper and sent that. In each case, the samples eventually were sequenced. A lab checked a portion of the RNA sequences in the samples to identify the microbes.

Do the microbes in my own gut make me healthy? Is the ecosystem of my gut different than my husband’s? Each project is asking a question about the vast largely uncharted multitudes of microbes that live in and on our bodies, and in our homes. I wrote in earlier blog post about these projects.

Donating these microbes made me curious. Learning more about my own skin – literally what lives on my skin – made me wonder more and more. Living in Seattle, I am surrounded by science that probes what is known as “big data.” Our town is especially full of scientists who specialize in mind-bogglingly large sets of data, including terabytes of information from the genetic sequences of thousands of bacteria living in the human gut, to name one example. These data scientists have to invent their own education, because typical classes don’t serve them. I met some of them when writing a story for Seattle Business magazine.

Many microbiologists will tell you – the microbes don’t just outnumber us on Earth, they add up to more biomass than all the terrestrial mammals of earth added together. While the comparison may seem unfair, the point is that we should not overlook the microscopic world of our planet. Our indifference to these creatures because of their scale is exactly what author David Haskell in the quote above eloquently points out is blindness.

During a recent conference of citizen scientists, I had reason to think about this blindness. Our session explained how people donate microbes for a variety of research projects. The participation itself, I would argue, changes the way you look at the microbes. But it also changes the way you think about scale. You appreciate that the collective action of millions of small creatures may influence bulky organisms like ourselves. In a similar way, going to a conference can make one appreciate the collective ecosystem of thousands of citizens. Might we make big changes happen?

During the conference, many of us talked about whether people who volunteer to collect data for science emerge from the experience with new outlooks. There are more and more people involved in citizen science, so it is worth wondering whether they will vote or spend money differently because of it.

What may seem like an abstract discussion could save the life of someone you love, if they spend time in a hospital and come home with an infection from an organism known as clostridium difficile. These organisms can make people terribly sick and transplants of gut bacteria (in fecal matter) from healthy people have cured some of those patients. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control released new statistics suggesting that nearly half-a-million Americans are infected per year.

Thinking differently about scale is one reason that pioneers thought of the fecal transplants to treat patients with C. diff infections. While we don’t understand enough to define a “healthy” microbiome, the change in thinking is mammoth. Most people share some similarities within their families of their gut microbiome and there’s some evidence we acquire our microbiome from our Mom. Many questions spin out from this change in thinking.

One day when washing some carrots from a local farm, I wondered if the microbes in the dirt I was washing away might actually hold more benefit for me than the carrots themselves. At my local gym, I wondered if the reason people who exercise in groups seem to live longer could be related to to the microbe sharing that happens when we share mats and weights. I’m not suggesting either of these ideas is true but just pointing out that once you view the microbes as potential actors in your health, it makes you see differently.

Scientists around the world are now asking questions about microbial life in relation to human health, as well as the ecological health of our built environment and our wild places. They are demonstrating a new way to “see” questions about health. There is research on the relation of gut health to autism, obesity, diabetes and depression, just to give some examples.

As our knowledge about microbes increases, we may see our world very differently. We may be minor players in a game driven partly by these microscopic actors. Stay tuned for more posts on this topic. I welcome your questions.

Let me leave you with a wonderful 25-minute video by microbiome reseacher, Jonathan Eisen, who presented in March at a meeting called the Future of Genomic Medicine. Sorry that the video begins with a short advertisement.

Image above used with permission of the Pacific Northwest National Labs. Taken by Janine Hutchison. Green is lactobacillus reuteri, purple is collagen microsphere, and brown is intestinal cell.