Rock Doc

Taken together, the microbes living in you weigh a few pounds. Just for example, a 200-pound man could be carrying up to six pounds of little organisms in and on him.

And even more amazingly to me, within our bodies we have more than 10,000 different species of microbes. That’s a lot of different life forms, all co-existing with each other and with us.

Those arresting facts got my attention when scientists from the government’s Human Microbiome Project recently announced some of their research findings. My friend Dr. Phil Mixter of the School of Molecular Biosciences at Washington State Univer...