A new light on causes in human health-associated microbiome studies by unearthing its ecological roots
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
Causality in Epidemiology
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
The research of causes in health-associated microbiome studies is based on the original or variants of Koch?s postulates (e.g., Lynch et al., 2019; Neville, 2018). They are helpful for the detection of single and specific causal factors of diseases, e.g., microorganisms. They have been successful for some time, especially in the case of monocausal diseases, and gave rise to the germ theory of diseases. The ideas of specificity in terms of monocausality and homogeneity of causes are pervasive in contemporary medicine (Ross, 2018). They are also ubiquitous in microbiome studies, e.g., researching biomarkers for cancers or researching a curative ?silver bullet? bacteria. As a result, the default assumptions in those researches are often a monocausal and specific cause for a disease or an intervention.
However, I argue that scientists in health-associated microbiome studies have forgotten their history. Microbiology and microbiome studies are also ecological disciplines, not only medical ones. The father of microbial ecology is Sergei Winogradsky. While younger than Robert Koch, he was one of his contemporaries. In Winogradsky?s work, the research of causes is not focused on entities but on processes and interactions. He was studying the natural phenomena of the soil and the microorganismal community within it. He recognized at face values that those phenomena were complex by nature, i.e., multifactorial and non-entity specific.
In this work, I will explore the state of health-associated microbiome studies if the default position would have been ?Winogradskian,? i.e., looking for several factors and non-specific entities before looking for specific and unique causes. It might be then that the contemporary attempts at simplicity would be an exception rather than a rule and that more global and integrative approaches, such as the one defended in the OneHealth concept, would have come sooner, impacting epidemiology-related policies.
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