A single human body carries trillions of bacteria. In women, those microbes rise and fall with estrogen, and they help decide who delivers a baby early, who gets an infection that will not clear, and who does not.
That was the argument Francesco De Seta, a gynecologist at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, brought to Temple University's Innovation Nest on Monday, two days after the Sbarro Health Research Organization honored him in Washington with its Healthcare Leadership Award. His lecture, "The Woman as an Ecosystem," opened a day of science hosted by SHRO, the Italian-American research nonprofit based at Temple, in a hub it helped bring into being.
