No, this is not a reference to the latest Zombie movie and is not a typo.
I was reading the latest issue of Science magazine which listed its top science subjects for 2013 (it is that season for lists). Their top subject was Microbiome.
If my daughters were still in high school, microbiome would immediately be put down as an SAT word and added to the study list. From Wikipedia a microbiome is “the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share out body space”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbiome. The word was created by Joshua Lederberg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Lederberg.
Even though they make up over 90% of the cells in your body, since they are very small, the total weight of all of these cells in your body weighs somewhere between 7.1 and 48 ounces (there is argument), so I guess collectively not a candidate for achieving much weight loss.
The importance of the microbial cells is evidently enormous. They affect how the body deals with diseases and potentially almost every aspect of your existence including the onset of depression or anxiety and may be a major factor in causing autism.
In addition to being interesting in and of itself this study supports my continuing feeling that when dealing with cybersecurity (I guess it is hard for me to stay away from the subject) I am increasingly of the belief that the metaphor to use when architecting computer systems is a biological one.
Perhaps we should consider designing protection schemes that work like the microbiome population in the human body. There is a growing thought that when thinking about people one should not just be looking at the individual but the entire ecosystem that it (they?) represent. Perhaps we should look at computer networks in the same fashion.
Later this week, Thursday, December 19, I hope to attend a Brookings Institute session entitled Lesson on Counterinsurgency from the Human Body. General Stanley McChrystal and Kristina Talbert-Slagle, the latter an Associate Research Scientist from the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute, will talk about “parallels between insurgencies and illness and between healthy bodies and healthy nations”. My first thought is that this all ties together in some fashion conceptually (organically?).