by Mau­reen O'Malley — Quite a lot has been writ­ten about hu­man mi­cro­biome re­search and how it changes older ideas about hu­man au­ton­omy, in­di­vid­u­al­ity and iden­tity. Most of these dis­cus­sions fo­cus on how the bi­o­log­i­cal ba­sis for our 'self' is in fact a con­sor­tium of dif­fer­ent lin­eages of cells, and that the ma­jor­ity of these cells are mi­cro­bial.