On my drive to work today, a thought crossed my mind.
Since our bodies have more viruses/bacteria than own own cells, we are not really individuals; we're biomes.
I wonder if a married couple sharing their biomes become similar in part because of the shared biome.
So I thought of this experiment:
Find two volunteers (a male and a female, of similar age), who know nothing of one another.
After verifying that neither has a communicable disease, the experimenter would act as an agent to share their biome with each other as much as possible: mouth biome, face biome, genital biome, hand biome, torso biome, hair biome, etc.
After a period of time (three months? a year?), bring the couple together into a common living arrangement for a short while (a week?) and observe how they get along, and whether they have similar habits, etc.
I'm not sure yet how best to do this, how to have a control group, etc, but I think it has potential to be a very interesting experiment.
Originally published at:
https://kentwest.blogspot.com/2019/05/a-biology-experiment.html
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