Using this method this study might just prove, or at least insinuate, that the survivors of the Second Plague Pandemic that earned higher incomes and could afford higher-calorie foods are in fact possibly responsible for a "wide range of chronic diseases, including obesity, cardiovascular disease and poor mental health".
To their credit, they won't investigate the teeth of pre-industrialized people "without the permission and collaboration of decedent populations and stakeholders".
I'm not saying nothing good will come out research such as this. It is just interesting that it contains so much irrelevant signaling.
Hacker News comments have been in a bit of an anti-academia, pro-business mood recently, so most relevant question copied below.
Imagine an (exploitative? Creative?) product launch for a probiotic yogurt made “to give you the biome of a true paleo”. We might want to ensure those whose mouths were swabbed to unlock that tag line were compensated.
> Q: What is microbiome ownership, and why is it important? Weyrich: This means that someone could own or have rights to their own bacteria. The ‘next generation’ of probiotics to support health are coming from people who donate their microbes — not yogurts or fermented foods, so establishing a framework for people to own their microbes means that they could benefit or profit from the commercialization of these microbes. This framework is important for providing equal benefits for research participants, research teams and companies that may want to commercialize someone’s microbes to make ‘next generation’ probiotics.
recently? bro this is an incubator for SV startups -- its always been that way.
I'm familiar with the notion that "everything is politics" and the like, but it is a completely useless rule of thumb for everyone but undergraduate zealots and ideologues, who ultimately prefer to spend their energy defending their bias instead of looking at the data.
It's obviously nonsense - so why claim it?
The part about indiginous research is kind of mad as well - "This research places unnecessary responsibilities and obligations on Indigenous communities to participate in microbiome research". We're talking about a mouth swab here.
It makes me glad I don't work in academia!
You get the permission from whoever owns the land the graves are in, as well as the UK government.
All European people have a unique male ancestor 300 generations away. If you locate remains of that age, do you have to ask nobody or everybody? (Depending on whether it's the male ancestor of all of us, or some other male whose last descendent died long ago?)
Because there has been a rich history of Western (colonial) powers looting graves or remembrances of the dead (e.g. shrunken heads) in the past, and there are numerous legal issues being fought to this day about repatriation of human remains back to their home countries. There is no need to pile more case on the already large pile.
I assumed from the title that the oral bacteria would reveal some preferential defense or resistance to yersinia pestis, but instead it was entirely due to the post-epidemic economies of the survivors.
This is more like the situation of beriberi crippling the imperial Japanese navy in the 1880s
