Microbiome experts warn of an ‘invisible extinction’ that’s harming human health

When Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello travels to the Amazon jungle and tells villagers the reason for her visit, their first response is often laughter. “Did you come all this way just to see my poop?” they ask. She did — no humor intended — and she has been doing it for more than 20 years. She and husband Martin Blaser, both scientists at Rutgers University, are the stars of a new documentary called "Invisible Extinction," describing their years of research on how modern diet and medicine are disrupting our internal colonies of bacteria and other microbes — the human microbiome. The microbiome ha...