What happens when you try to wash yourself only with microbes–and then write about it.

For millions of years, humans and their ancestors managed to keep themselves clean without Pantene or Dr. Bronners Magic Pure-Castile Soap. For a story in the special health issue of last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Julia Scott, a writer and radio producer in San Francisco, decided to try that.

It wasn't a perfect experiment. Rather than allowing her body to keep itself clean, as Homo habilis must have done, she participated in an experiment in which she sprayed face, scalp, and body with a cosmetic mist laced with Nitrosomonas eutropha, a bacterium that oxidizes ammonia, she reports. Scientists at the company running the experiment–AOBiome, a biotech start-up in Cambridge, Mass.–"hypothesize that it once lived happily on us too — before we started washing it away with soap and shampoo — acting as a built-in cleanser, deodorant, anti-inflammatory and immune booster by feeding on the ammonia in our sweat and converting it into nitrite and nitric oxide." The idea is to re-create something like the bacterial community–the microbiome–that flourished on the skin of H. habilis, for example.

As a writer, Scott has a nice touch, and she has fun with this story, as she should. Early in the story, we learn more about AOBiome's executives than we want to know:

[CEO Spiros] Jamas, a quiet, serial entrepreneur with a doctorate in biotechnology, incorporated N. eutropha into his hygiene routine years ago; today he uses soap just twice a week. The chairman of the company’s board of directors, Jamie Heywood, lathers up once or twice a month and shampoos just three times a year. The most extreme case is David Whitlock, the M.I.T.-trained chemical engineer who invented AO+. He has not showered for the past 12 years. He occasionally takes a sponge bath to wash away grime but trusts his skin’s bacterial colony to do the rest. I met these men. I got close enough to shake their hands, engage in casual conversation and note that they in no way conveyed a sense of being “unclean” in either the visual or olfactory sense.

All the same, I'm not in a hurry to shake hands with them. And Scott undercuts her visual and olfactory perceptions when she writes about her own situation midway through the experiment: "Mortified by my body odor, I kept my arms pinned to my sides, unless someone volunteered to smell my armpit. One friend detected the smell of onions. Another caught a whiff of 'pleasant pot.'”

Because the story is mainly about hygiene, rather than health (which makes it a bit of an odd fit for a special health issue), Scott isn't tempted to make too many grandiose claims about the medicinal benefits of N. eutropha mist. She suffers one lapse when she quotes a scientist not involved with the company, who tells her that discoveries about the microbiome–sometimes called the second genome–"might one day not only revolutionize treatments for acne but also — as AOBiome and its biotech peers hope — help us diagnose and cure disease, heal severe lesions and more. Those with wounds that fail to respond to antibiotics could receive a probiotic cocktail adapted to fight the specific strain of infecting bacteria. Body odor could be altered to repel insects and thereby fight malaria and dengue fever. And eczema and other chronic inflammatory disorders could be ameliorated."

These claims are so fabulous, compared to what's claimed for the skin spray, that I doubt many readers took them seriously. And they're provocative–somebody some of those things might happen.

Scott's report has not, however, persuaded me to give this a try, even if I had a connection in the N. eutropha black market. My typing gets terribly cramped when I'm trying to keep my arms pinned to my sides.

-Paul Raeburn