If you work backward from my most recent posts there are a lot of research ideas I'd love to pursue. The neuroscience series, dark energy, and evolution distance specifically.

Twins are rare enough (1/90 births) so to have a combined vaginal/caesarean birth is much, much more rare (1/2250.)
http://pregnancy.about.com/cs/twinsmore/a/aatwinlabor.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin
Nevertheless, it’s the rare things that get studied most.

I haven’t found a study that focused on gut flora diffrences in twins from combined births yet, but I’m still looking.

Evidence that c-sections predispose infants to illness is widespread, however.
http://adc.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/89/11/993?lookupType=volpage&vol;=89&fp;=993&view;=short

But there is also proof that vaginal delivery has its own risks.
http://www.jacionline.org/article/PIIS0091674902000453/abstract

Pretty fascinating if you ask me.

That seems to make a lot of intuitive sense. I suppose the question is, how much of a factor would it be? It’d certainly be another data point for twin studies (tracking differences in gut flora where one twin was delivered normally and the other via cesarean…).

Jordan- connecting different bacteria to different organs would be an interesting task, but a very hard and fuzzy one, so much so that I don’t think much of interest can be said about it yet.

I was surprised to recently see that the wikipedia entry presents the subject (candida is implicated in autoimmune dysfunction) as though there is no controversy nor has there ever been. Nothing on the talk page either. And they have citations. Just six months ago, there was more controversy.

I brought it up as a way of attempting to address the last sentence in your post: “I haven’t found any literature that covers what I would like to study, which is modeling gut flora’s influence on personality without the mediating frame of a specific disease.” I still can’t quite get at it, and I’m getting too tired to try, so I’ll just give you a link to something which is related to this topic but where I don’t come right out and say what I’m actually thinking.

I’m going to poke around your site a bit more tomorrow.

Oh, yeah, Jordan: Don’t know, don’t know, and I think that candida is actually supposed to be found in the lower intestine. The eruptions of candida in the mouth and the vagina are supposedly due to the overuse of antibiotics.

Candida albicans is a tough topic– there are so many claims and so much corresponding skepticism that it’s really impossible to figure out what’s going on. Hopefully respectable scientists can at least get funding to study it, and in a couple years the dust will settle and we can figure out if it’s really as big of an influence on modern health as some people believe. I suspect it’ll be somewhere in the middle: there are tons of interesting and probably largely factual claims about the mechanisms by which it can influence health, but there are just *so many other* similar organisms that probably do similar things that I think it’s unwise to classify it as some sort of manipulative superbug. At this point.

If I were a scientist studying candida albicans I’d probably focus on the interplay between candida and the immune system. For the claims about candida (which I have some sympathy with) to hold water, candida’s gotta be fairly unique in how it finesses the immune system.