People bank blood. Why not faeces?

to put something aside for a rainy day. And not just money can be put in a bank. Blood from donors is routinely banked, too. And some parents bank blood from their child’s umbilical cord, on the off-chance that stem-cells therein will prove useful for the future treatment of bone-marrow cancer. But three researchers at Harvard Medical School propose going further. They suggest people consider banking deposits, as it were, of their faeces.Yang-Yu Liu, Shanlin Ke and Scott Weiss describe their proposal in . Modern life, they observe, is not kind to gut bacteria. Terrible eating habits; frequent use of antibiotics; jet-lag-inducing, diet-changing travel; sleep deprivation; even simply living longer; these all take a toll on the complex microbial ecosystems hosted by people’s intestines. That contributes to a range of illnesses, including infections, irritable-bowel syndrome (), inflammatory bowel disease, type 2 diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular problems and colorectal cancer.