 I work as part of the Human Microbiome Project, which is a new initiative funded by the NIH Common Fund. For almost 20 years now, I've been a researcher working in a laboratory. But this was a new opportunity to really work with physicians and microbiologists and laboratory scientists who all come together to form a group to ask a very simple but important question, which is, what are the bacteria that live on our body and how do they contribute to our health and to disease states? Well, the question is old. What are the bacteria that live on our body? And for a long time we've answered that question by seeing what we could culture and what would grow when we put them on bacterial plates like this. So for a long time we would look under the microscope and say, oh, staph epidermidis is the dominant bacteria that lives on your skin. Well, this project is exploration. What we have found by not just looking at what we can culture, but what we can actually sequence. It's like you go in with a microscope and at first if you didn't have a very powerful lens, you'd be able to see maybe some of the larger pieces of when you look under a microscope you could see a hair or something like that. But when we go in with this more powerful microscope of looking at the DNA sequence of every bacteria that's there, suddenly we see this enormous diversity. We find staph epidermidis. It's not that what you learned in the textbooks isn't true. It's just that there is an entire ecosystem of bacteria that live there, many of which are really hard to culture. And they don't grow very well on these Petri dishes that we have because that's not what they've evolved to do. They've evolved to live on our skin. And they eat, you know, the dead parts of our skin. But what do they do for us? Like why would we want to have these bacteria living on our skin? Well, they then take some of these oils that our skin cells produce and they turn it into a natural moisturizing. We're really trying to think about what are the healthy bacteria that live on our skin and to really focus on those healthy bacteria. Now, there are bacteria that come in and cause infections. And so I'm not saying that we shouldn't worry about bacteria getting onto our skin and not just as a scientist but as a mother of two young kids, I believe very strongly in hand washing. And I hope my kids wash their hands every time they come in from the playground. But we have to lose this language of warfare and thinking about bacteria as only pathogenic. Bacteria in the gut aid and digestion. Bacteria on the skin, aid in keeping your skin moist and moisturized and supple. And if you have a very, you know, smooth skin, then you don't have cracks in your skin where bad bacteria could get in. And the good bacteria, what we call the commensal bacterias, are also basically holding the property on your skin. And so if a good bacteria is standing there occupying that space, the good bacteria is going, I'm here, I'm here. You can try to, you know, sit down here and, you know, I'm here and I'm providing a benefit to this person. And this person does not want you living on their skin, so get out of here. And that's sort of the difference between the transient bacteria that you wash off your hands and the ones that take up residence on your skin. So what is the exploration? Well, the exploration is about how does a microbial shift or the small microorganisms, these bacteria, how does a bacterial shift contribute to disease states and then how do you bring that back into balance to achieve health again? And what we're learning about this is also just changing the way we think about ourselves. What we found was that on healthy volunteers, the skin is an ecosystem. And what that means is that the bacteria that live here on my chest are really different than the bacteria that live here in my underarm are really different than the bacteria that live here in the bend of my elbow. Well, of course, I mean, here is a sweaty area with large hair follicles. And here is a moist area that has, you know, really no hair. When you sweat, that's a waste product of bacteria. And, you know, why do you areas that you sweat and, you know, smell bad? And why does your underarm smell different than your feet, the bottom of your foot, your sneaker? Because these are different areas that sweat and they do have different types of ecosystems of bacteria. What I've seen is that people now are using all these antimicrobial products and, you know, we just, we don't know how that's going to change the bacteria that live on our skin and how that's affecting the good bacteria and the bad bacteria. And what we know is a whole history of when you wash your hands, you wash off all the transient bacteria. But, you know, the bacteria that live on our body are not necessarily bad and we should treat them with a little bit more respect.