The Microbial SelfSensation and Sympoiesis

The idea that we people are really walking assemblages,beings who have integrated various other kinds oforganisms—that each of us is a sort of loosecommittee—opens up … many challenging speculations.When "the committee" gets sick, is simply a single animalgetting sick, or is illness more a rearrangement of the members?

—Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes, 19

Consider the spirochete. A long, narrow, tightly coiled bacterium featuring internal flagella bundled together in sheaths, the spirochete propels itself forward through continuous rotation. Spirochetes, in other words, are adept tiny drills, far too small to be detected by standard microscopy. They penetrate tissues of the human body that bacteria typically cannot enter and that pursuant immune leukocytes have difficulty reaching: mammalian and avian brain, bone, cartilage, and gelatinous connective tissue. They also bore through individual cell walls. Thus, once spirochetes have drilled into the body, they often remain.

Emergent microbiology research suggests that spirochete infections are likely relations for the long haul, with ramifications still largely unknown. Some spirochetes have long-term symbiotic relationships with the bodies they dwell within, with effects both beneficial and disastrous. Several, such as Treponema pallidum and Borrelia burgdorferi, are notorious for their capacity to cross the mammalian blood-brain barrier, a homeostasis-ensuring endothelial layer lining blood and lymphatic vessels that protects the brain and also prevents the passage of most medication into brain tissue. These bacteria result in syphilis and Lyme disease, respectively, both devastating, multisystemic illnesses. The latter is embroiled in a heated controversy: Do the ongoing, often-disabling sensory, affective, cognitive, and muscular-skeletal symptoms experienced by hundreds of thousands of Lyme patients for months and years—even after the recommended twenty-eight days of antibiotic therapy—reflect chronic infection, as patients, activists, and their Lyme-literate physicians insist? Or are these symptoms signs of a lingering postinfection inflammatory syndrome that fails to respond to further antibiotic treatment, as most infectious disease practitioners and researchers, and authorities including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA), advise?¹ Tens of thousands of patients are caught in these Lyme wars, a debate that enables health insurance companies to deny coverage to even the most debilitated patients beyond the recommended short courses of treatment.²

Yet the very terms of this controversy, which hinge on competing explanations of ongoing infection or noninfectious inflammatory response, are themselves stuck within an increasingly obsolete biomedical model that positions spirochetes and other so-called harmful bacteria as pathogenic intruders into the inviolate well body. The debate as typically construed in a clinical setting concerns the temporality of infection rather than the validity of the conventional infection model to which both sides ascribe. It is this biomedical model, in which the body is positioned as a discrete milieu that must be defended against external pathogens, that spirochetes most clearly destabilize.³

The individual human body is entangled in spirals with spirochetes, unfolding and enfolding in dynamic relation with the bacteria in ways that challenge conventional notions of infection, disease, and health. The late microbiologist Lynn Margulis and her lab insisted that existing research demonstrates the "irreversible integration of spirochetes at behavioral, metabolic, gene product and genetic levels into animal tissue," integration that impacts species change over time.⁴ Margulis's lab provocatively asks if spirochete illness is "better described as an obligate and ancient symbiosis where the bionts (spirochetes and humans) are integrated at the behavioral, metabolic and genetic level rather than a new viral [or bacterial] infection?"⁵ For Eva Hayward, infection discourse is itself a key player in the fiction of the human subject, a discourse that paradoxically "exposes the symptom that our body has never been our own."⁶ The rise of the Human Microbiome Project and related investigations suggests that medical research is slowly inching toward a perspective increasingly insisted on by environmental humanities scholars and embraced by publics at large—that we live our lives fully imbricated with our environments, including microbial life-forms, which not only are interdependent with us but, more fundamentally, do not preexist as...