The Poop Cure

Client: American Museum of Natural History

Roles: Illustration, Animation, Sound Design

Your poop contains living beings! Most of it isn’t alive, of course—as you’d expect, a lot of it is made up of things like water, undigested food, and dead human cells. But more than half the dry weight of poop is bacteria. And the bacteria we flush down the toilet are only a small sample of the vast population inside us. These microbes play a vital role in our bodies—for example, producing vitamins, helping break down food, or keeping dangerous bacteria from growing out of control. Our health depends on their health. 

What happens when something goes wrong with those invaluable inner companions? Physicians are increasingly turning to an exciting, if icky procedure: Fecal transplants. Yes, this is just what it sounds like. Doctors take somebody else’s poop—“thoroughly tested poop, for-sure healthy poop, just beautiful poop,” in the words of Ari Grinspan, Director of GI Microbial Therapeutics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City—and place it in the patient’s colon. While fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) dates back at least to 4 th century China, its systematic use in the United States is more recent. In the 1980s doctors discovered that fecal transplants could effectively treat intestinal infections caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile, and in 2013 the FDA classified fecal matter as a drug.