A Citizen Scientist Makes Her Mark in Microbiome Research

The BioCollective, a company that transforms whole stool samples into microbial metadata, is developing the US’s first national microbiome reference material.

Written byAmy Schleunes

| 5 min read

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The first thing Martha Carlin noticed was a faraway look in her husband’s eyes. It was a subtle change, she says, something only a wife would see. She happened to be reading Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox at the time, and began to wonder about some of the symptoms she’d observed in her husband: his loss of facial expressions, his quivering pinky finger, his trembling tongue. An appointment with an internist led to an appointment with a neurologist, who confirmed Carlin’s worst fears. In the fall of 2002, her husband John was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He was 44 years old.

Carlin and her collaborators were convinced that stool held much more information than one small scoop could capture.

Carlin spent the next seven years reading everything she could find on Parkinson’s. A consultant skilled at identifying breakpoints in businesses, Carlin concluded that the disease ...

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Meet the Author

Amy Schleunes
A former intern at The Scientist, Amy studied neurobiology at Cornell University and later earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is a Los Angeles–based writer, editor, and communications strategist who collaborates on nonfiction books for Harper Collins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and also teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University CTY. Her favorite projects involve sharing the insights of science and medicine.
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