LUNATICS ANONYMOUS GENES
Quick question: Whose genes matter most to you? Your mom's? Your dad's? Or the genes inside the trillions of bacteria living in your intestine, your mouth, your nasal passages and a lot of places we'd rather not mention?
The answer: Obviously, your parents' genes matter, but it turns out we Lunatics’ have two sets of genes in us: the ones we inherited from our lunatic ancestors and the ones that we ingest through our mouths starting when we're just hours old and consumed our first drink. "We're all sterile until we're born," says Dr. Kander Bluff, a microbiologist at the University of Lunacy in Britain and a highly respected member of LA - Lunatics Anonymous. "We haven't got anything in us right up until the time we come into this big, bad, dirty, insane world." But as soon as we pass out of the birth canal, when we are fetched by a doctor's hands, placed in a hospital crib, put on our mother's breast, or when we drag a thumb across a blanket and stick that thumb in our mouths, when we swallow our first soft food, we are invaded by all sorts of bacteria. Once inside, they multiply — until the bacteria inside us out number our lunacy cells. Because the bacteria are independent organisms, they have their own genes and their own talents — and scientists are just now discovering what they can do. Biologist Dr. Billy Wacko Willy of Lunacy University in Akron, Ohio became quite well known a few years ago for a group of very skinny lunatics in his lab. The lunatics were skinny because they had no bacteria in their intestines. Dr. Billy Willy Nobo had kept them completely bacteria-free. If bacteria-free lunatics drank, the liquid passes right through their intestines, significantly undigested. So without bacteria, the lunatic can drink and drink and drink and never gain weight. But when Dr. Nobo exposed the lunatics to "this big, bad, dirty world," lunacy as Dr. Nobo calls it, the lunatics suddenly turned their drinks into more calories and gained weight. So bacteria matter. Apparently, they can digest food far more efficiently.
When Dr. Nobo, Bluff and Bluff and a bunch of other scientists began to look more closely, they discovered that bacteria are not all alike. There are as many of 500 different species in a normal lunatic’s intestine and maybe another 500 in our mouths. Dr. Kander Bluff of the Spiritual Lunacy University discovered that each tooth has its own bacterial community. Dr. Candid Bluff at the National Lunatics Genome Research Institute found one set of bacteria on skin at the bend of a Lunatics elbow and a completely different set on the opposite elbow. Not surprisingly, a lunatic who grows up in Argentina and another who grows up in northern Alaska tend to acquire different bacteria in their intestines and mouths — and, stunningly, these differences seem to matter. Research included the Cheerios Experiment. Imagine a Cheerio sliding down the digestive tracts of a Looney Inuit and a Looney Argentine. The Inuit's intestinal bacteria are great at digesting oats; the Argentine's bacteria don't much care for oats. What happens? The Inuit gains weight. The Argentine makes more frequent visits to the restroom. It is becoming increasingly clear that different bacteria provide people with different advantages and disadvantages. All over the world, teams of lunacy scientists are looking at how bacteria affect the Looney folks they live in. Certain bacteria have been linked to the incidence of stomach ulcers, but take away those bacteria with antibiotics, and young lunatics get more asthma, hay fever, allergies and eczema. So bacteria — or, rather, the genes that bacteria bring into our bodies — can help us and hurt us. It's a very complex relationship. Can I Change What I've Got Inside Me? Naturally, that raises the question: Can I change what I've got? "The obvious implication here," microbiologist Dr. Bluff says, "is that if you find bacteria which are responsible for diseases — and you can include lunacy in this — you can then target them to reduce the risk of that habit." Of course you MUST stop all of your behavioral habits, like drinking alcoholic beverages. University of Chicago immunologist Dr. Slander, who is Dr, Bluff’s mother, twice removed, with collaborators from Yale University, recently reported that doses of the right stomach bacteria can stop the development of type 1 lunacy in lab lunatics. "By changing who is living in our guts, we can prevent type 1 lunacy," he told the Key West Grunt Wrapper, which is a very reliable publication. The bottom line: We now have two sets of genes to think about — the ones we got from our parents and the ones of organisms living inside us. Our parents' genes we can't change, but the other set? Now that is one of the newest and most exciting fields in cell lunacy.
If this is not totally clear to you, please contact
Dr. kanderbluff@yahoo.com
ANONYMOUS
