Clean: The New Science of Skin by James Hamblin

Author:James Hamblin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2020-07-20T23:00:00+00:00

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After leaving Amish country, I head to a secretive, heavily guarded compound just outside Chicago called the Argonne National Laboratory. Argonne is an enormous bureaucratic facility with buildings marked Area 400 and Area 500, started by the federal government in 1942 as an early part of the Manhattan Project.

An armed guard greets me at the gate and asks me my business. I say that I’m a curious taxpayer, and she doesn’t laugh, and instead asks me to turn around and go back to a security office for clearance. My rental car is searched, and finally a gate opens to allow me to enter the mazelike grounds. I keep looking for clues of some government conspiracy that would necessitate this level of security—an errant bag of humanoid organs discarded on the side of the road, a forgotten military-grade hoverboard idling in a field, the distant cackling of a mad scientist.

I would later learn that in addition to the long-secret nuclear work, chemists at Argonne also discovered elements 99 and 100 and first visualized a neutrino. The facility was home to a proton accelerator called the Zero Gradient Synchrotron that allowed physicists to track subatomic particles, and to the first nuclear reactor that could reprocess its own fuel, reducing atomic waste and avoiding additional disasters like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Researchers at Argonne still do national security work, including developing defenses against bioterrorism and cyberattacks.

It is also here that Jack Gilbert studies the microbes that populate our skin and bowels. I eventually find my way to a warehouselike building that houses his labs and office. As I step inside, I hear my name called from the end of a long hallway decorated with scientific illustrations of double helices and viruses. Gilbert is bounding toward me, waving. There is that period of silence that happens when you’ve greeted someone too early and don’t know what to say next, or if you should make eye contact.

He’s dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a brown T-shirt, his face unshaven and hair tousled. He does not noticeably smell bad, nor does he look unhealthy, but rather like he doesn’t give a damn what I think of him, because he’s worried about more important things, and he has been working on them since the moment he woke up. He is, in other words, a scientist.

Gilbert is a sort of prodigy in the microbiome field. At forty-one, when we met, he was a full professor at the University of Chicago overseeing five affiliated microbiology labs, including the one at Argonne. He was one of Mark Holbreich and Erica von Mutius’s collaborators on the Amish allergy study.

“So, I shower,” he says, cutting right to the chase. “I do shower, even though I know the potential implications of it. Not every day, and I don’t tend to use a lot of soap when I do. Occasionally I will wash my hair with a shampoo, but I use a very, very light shampoo.”

Gilbert points out that we are always covered in microbes—even while in the shower.

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