Your gut microbes might encourage criminal behavior

The parasite is famous for changing rodent behavior in ways that make them easier prey – it seems that the infection makes the mice lose their fear permanently. Human research is not anywhere close to crucial, but some studies have linked inflammation with the parasite to personality changes, increased aggression, and impulsivity.

“This is an example of the microbiology that we know affects the brain and can affect the legal aspect of a person who is being tried for a crime,” Allen Ferfiro says. “They may say” my microbes made me do it, “and I may believe them.”

There is more evidence that binds the intestinal microbes to behavior in mice, which is one of the most well studied creatures. One study included stool transplants – a procedure that includes the introduction of a costume from animal to another. Since stool has a lot of intestinal bacteria, stool transplants can run somewhat to exchange the intestine microbiome. (Humans do this also – and it seems significantly effective to treat fixed Jim is difficult Infections in people.)

In 2013, scientists at the University of McMaster in Canada performed fecal transplants between two mice strains, one known to be shy and another that tends to be somewhat. This bowel microbial swap appears to switch their behavior – shy mice have become more exotic, and vice versa.

Since then, microbiologists held this study as one of the clearest demonstrations on how to change the intestinal microbes to change behavior – at least in mice. “But the question is: How much do they control you, and how much is the human part of you able to overcome this control?” Allen Ferfiro says. “This is a very difficult question to answer it.”

After all, our intestinal microbes can change, although they are relatively stable. Your diet, routine, environment, and even the people you live with can form the microbes that live in you. The ways that these societies and the effect of behavior may be slightly different for everyone. It will be very difficult to put precise links between some microbes and criminal behaviors very difficult, if not impossible.

“I don’t think you will be able to take a microbium person and say” Oh, see-you got the cause of X, and this means that you are a serial killer. “

Either way, Brickut hopes to help us progress in microbiology and metabolism to understand the bonds between microbes and chemicals that produce it and criminal behaviors – and may even treat these behaviors.

“We can reach a place where microbial interventions are part of therapeutic programming,” she says.

This article appeared for the first time in the examination, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review Weekly newsletter of biotechnology. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, read articles like this first, Subscribe here.