As genomics research delves into the uniqueness of individual bodies in search of individualized health interventions, it has also shed new light on old uncertainties about humans as individual bodies and about diseases as problems of those individual bodies. The discovery of the human microbiome has called into question our very concepts of what it means to be human by revealing the vast communities of microorganisms that not only live in our bodies, but play an essential part in the functions of these bodies that we once thought of as solely our own.13
