Stalking the dirt vaccine
Can good bacteria make the brain more stress-resilient? Christopher Lowry has dedicated his career to finding out
Christopher Lowry was a precocious 6-year-old, fond of playing in the dirt near his home in rural Wyoming, when researchers 8,000 miles away made a discovery that would end up shaping his career.
The year was 1971. British scientists had noticed that people living near Lake Kyoga in Uganda responded much better to certain vaccines than those elsewhere did. They suspected something in the environment was at play, and when they investigated, they discovered an intriguing orange slime—later identified asÌýMycobacterium vaccae—stretching across the shoreline.