A Probiotic Skin Cream Made With a Person’s Own Microbes
A new approach to treating eczema harnesses the defensive bacteria that already live on us.
In 1928, the British chemist Alexander Fleming returned from a vacation in the countryside to find that his lab was a frightful mess. There was, for example, a pile of Petri dishes in his sink, each of which contained a carpet of Staphylococcus aureus—a bacterium that can cause severe skin infections. On one such carpet, Fleming noticed that a bit of mold had landed, and carved out a kill-zone of slaughtered bacteria. From that mold, Fleming isolated a chemical called penicillin, and kicked off the modern antibiotic era.
Like penicillin, all our antibiotics were created naturally by microbes to suppress or kill other microbes. We then found and exploited these weapons. Fleming himself was always
