The human body is host to 100 trillion microorganisms, ten times the number of cells in the human body and these microbes contain 100 times the number of DNA genes that our human DNA does. The microbial component of our "superorganism" is comprised of hundreds of species with immense biodiversity. Thanks to the National Institutes of Health's Human Microbiome Program researchers have been discovering the states of the human microbiome in health and disease. To put a more personal face on the "patient of the future," I have been collecting massive amounts of data from my own body over the last five years, which reveals detailed examples of the episodic evolution of this coupled immune-microbial system. To decode the details of the microbial ecology requires high resolution genome sequencing feeding Big Data parallel supercomputers. Since modern medicine has not taken into account the nature and changes in the human microbiome, we can look forward to revolutionary changes in medical practice over the next decade.
Larry Smarr is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego / UC Irvine partnership and the Harry E. Gruber professor in UCSD's Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). Before that he served as founding Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He advises NASA, NIH, DOE, and NSF. His views have been quoted in Science, Nature, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, Wired, Fortune, Business Week, CNN, and the Atlantic. His personal interests include growing orchids, snorkeling coral reefs, and quantifying the state of his body.
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