Studying the calcified plaque in the teeth of ancient populations can be a better proxy for understanding the oral microbiomes in pre-industrialized societies than using present day indigenous societies practicing subsistence lifestyle.
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.
One hop from the parent article is a discussion on why these researchers believe it matters.
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.
OK so this just confirmed my hunch: the driver for this type of research is ideological. I'm not overly disgusted by it such as someone in the "anti-academia, pro-business" camp might be, I pick the chips on my shoulder with some care. But I much prefer research that is not ideologically biased - in any direction. The more extremist, the less I prefer it.
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.
That part jumped out at me. Why on earth do they need the permission of the descendents of someone who lived 500+ years ago? And how on earth are they even going to get it? Surely even if one guy says it's ok (and you can prove he's descended from a body you found), what happens if another person says no?
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.
This research is being done by US and Australian universities on remains from the UK. If you turn up in the UK and try to dig up random skeletons and send them to the US or Australia without the correct permissions, you're gonna get arrested. Probably very quickly, probably at the first grave yard you visit.
You get the permission from whoever owns the land the graves are in, as well as the UK government.
If I get your drift, you mean that research papers should henceforth have disclaimer, saying that "no law was broken during our research"? Fair enough, but I don't think that's what they were signaling by the quote in question somehow.
I think the point is that there are many places where (especially indigenous) remains don't have the same level of legal protection as they do in the UK. The universities also want to make sure their researchers get permission from whoever they should/can even in those places.
Indeed. 500 years is about 16 generations, so any ancestor of that age may have 65536 or even more descendents. You'd need to locate them and ask them all permission. How does it work, is it majority vote? Unanimous vote?
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?)
Human societies have elaborate processes to solve this issue: inheritance laws. In case no heirs can be located anymore (body can't be identified, records are missing, the line has died out, etc.) the state is the heir by default and makes the rules.
Why do you think you’re entitled to dig up peoples bodies and conduct research on indigenous people? That kind of entitlement is the cause of everything bad in the tech industry.
There's a limit, surely. After 3 generations of nobody having known you living: surely your body must have reverted to general property.
I don't want to start a holy war, I understand sentimentality. But if you dug up my great grandfathers great grandfather then honestly I have absolutely no connection to the man and his body could be anywhere on earth. It's not my property and despite sharing some of my genes it's part of the earth at that point.
What once was a man merely returned to the atoms and microbes of the planet that bore it.
That would be massively influenced by culture. An atheist materialist from the West is going to have a totally different view to someone from a culture where burial has all sorts of codified behaviours and beliefs associated with it.
Many indigenous cultures care deeply about their ancestors. And not just the most recent batch of them. Your idea that the remains of the dead should become "general property" that can be harvested, used, and/or abused as anyone sees fit is both absurd and offensive. Sorry, but we are sentimental creatures pretty much as a rule. We do get to pick and choose what we are sentimental about (to some degree), but it turns out a lot of people care about their ancestors and perhaps even the ancestors of other people in their community/culture who they aren't directly related to.
>What once was a man merely returned to the atoms and microbes of the planet that bore it.
Bones last for centuries, millennia, and longer. In fact bones are the very thing we are discussing (in the form of teeth), and they are obviously very much intact beyond your arbitrary 3 generation cutoff. So while your sentiment may be noble and erudite, it's not relevant at all.
thats kinda my point though. If you accidentally come across 300 year old human remains then of course care should be taken.
However after 8 generations there is already so little connection left, keeping in mind 8 generations is roughly 160-240 years.
Yes, we are sentimental creatures, however if we hold that human remains are permanently sacred then we will run out of habitable space on the planet if we continue to bury our dead.
Except we're not talking about "indigenous people". The study wants to investigate the teeth of pre-industrial Europeans, the polar opposite of indigenous people in that slightly vague dichotomy.
> pre-industrial Europeans, the polar opposite of indigenous people
I don't understand what you mean? Why would pre-industrial Europeans not be indigenous? Because they (in Britain) partly displaced the previous Celtic inhabitants (who themselves had likely displaced others before them)?
You appear to be missing the part where these are not British scientists researching British remains in Britain.
Yes, the Americans and Australians should ask before taking British remains from Britain away for research in their labs. I don't see where the research is conducted but there isn't any mention of collaboration with the UK so this would involve exporting the remains.
The assumption is that unlike minorities, indigenous Europeans are represented by their governments. As Europe becomes more diverse, that may become less true and it will be necessary to ask them directly.
You completely missed my point. How can anyone possibly ask the descendants of 500+ year old plague victims whether they consent to research on their teeth. Do you just go round knocking on every door in a 10 mile radius? I'm British, and so might be descended from the bodies they did research on. They didn't ask me - and they shouldn't have to.
Fine, clear it with an ethics committee, be open about what you're doing and debate the implications. But asking the descendants? That's not practical.
For the record, I've never conducted research on indigenous people - and have no plans to.
> How can anyone possibly ask the descendants of 500+ year old plague victims whether they consent to research on their teeth. Do you just go round knocking on every door in a 10 mile radius?
How many bodies do UK museums have stolen from other countries? The British museum alone states 6,000 human remains of which I don't know how many are non-UK.
>"Held in a number of departments for display and research, over 6,000 human remains are in the care of the Museum"
> Why on earth do they need the permission of the descendents of someone who lived 500+ years 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.
> there has been a rich history of Western (colonial) powers looting graves or remembrances of the dead
There is a rich history of everyone looting graves. This isn't a colonial vs other thing here. Sacking of places is common and still happens (see syria, afganistan & the sudans. ) We just happen to know about the stuff the western people did because they documented it and put it on display. (unlike the romans, persians, greeks, byzantines, ottermans, et al. didn't loose it to the next empire, yet.)
There used to be a bunch of TV shows where they'd routinely dig up bones and put them on shelves in storage.
That license is not relevant here, thats for relatively recent bodies where you want to dig them up to move them to a different grave or cremate them or something.
The most relevant thing here is that the remains are being taken outside the UK (the study is being done by US and Australian universities) so you need some permission to export them.
Legally, I can destructively analyze your ancestor's genetics, use it to get rich selling you skinny pills instead of an inexpensive one-time therapy, and unknowingly destroy the genetic information that would have unlocked a remedy for a birth defect that runs in your family. The law is very underdeveloped in this area, so ethics stand in for now.
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
There are a number of gut microbiome testing companies sponsoring studies on this and university labs who have found some promising candidate probiotics being clinically trialed to restore gut microbiome. We may be able to fix ours.
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.