A Trustworthy Terrain

Cultivating the Soil of Good Health

“Le microbe c’est rien. Le terrain c’est tout.”

(“The microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything.”)

These words, said to have been spoken by French scientist Louis Pasteur on his deathbed in 1895, conceded his germ theory to his rival, Antoine Béchamp, who held that it is the terrain upon which a germ falls that matters most.

No one can prove this dialogue ever took place, and no one really knows what Pasteur was thinking at the end of his life. Yet the rise of epigenetics – the science of gene expression – and our increasing knowledge of beneficial bacteria and the gut microbiome seem to be leading full circle back to this fork in the road. Did science turn the wrong way in its focus on germs over a century ago? What can we do to engage this new understanding and build a healthy terrain to protect ourselves from disease-causing microbes?