Memories of the 28th Century

While the subject of intestinal gas is not a common dinner table topic, it is something that we all have, and it is significant. Gas varies in fragrance from completely vile and sickening to mildly fragrant and almost pleasant. The fragrance is a result of the blend on intestinal flora and what is in the intestine. I looked up information about intestinal flora, and the information was overwhelmingly inexact.

There are hundreds of bacteria that are commonly found in human intestines, and they can be in varying blends. In addition, it is not uncommon for common soil and decay bacteria to take up residence. A few years ago, I ate some ground beef that was a little too far gone, and apparently I didn’t cook it well enough. I didn’t become ill, but I started smelling like dog excrement. It took a few months to get rid of that entirely. Sometimes disease bacteria of various sorts infect the intestines, and that alters the normal blend, and we know something of the regional nature of the floral, such as Montezuma’s revenge; but there are different blends all around the world.

In the last several months I have become infected with bacteria that makes the fragrance in cow pies and with some bacteria that smells like dead, rotting things. Those collections of bacteria probably came from water that I should have treated, or, in one case, from town water that sat in a bottle too long. With all of the variation that I have had, the idea of making intestinal gas smell nice came to mind again.
There have to be bacteria that have pleasant smelling waste products, but finding those would be difficult. And the idea of the search reminds me of one bit in Gulliver’s Travels in which Swift described someone trying to transform fecal matter back into its original ingredients. Swift was poking fun at people who engaged in inane “scientific” experiments. On the other hand, Ben Franklin wrote an essay about making farts smell pretty, but he didn’t go any further with the idea, and he may have been joking; after all I am mostly joking about it.

What fragrance to aim for would also be a question that would have to be answered, but floral fragrances would be safe, and they might be possible, because they are also vegetable matter. I can picture a well put together woman walking along and passing some gas; she would initially be embarrassed, but then the fragrance of roses would spread around her, and she would smile, remembering that she had taken some special bacteria that was designed for doing that. If we could tailor some bacteria to attack particular substances, then we might do even better. For example, we might be able to tailor bacteria to eat the Polysaccharides from beans, so gas from beans would be pleasant, and we would be able to avoid the step of soaking the beans to get rid of the gas making substance.

Most intestinal bacteria are particular to a given area; although they are related to bacteria in other areas. One can kill some, or all, of the bacteria, but there are reserves in the appendix (thought by some to be the raison d’etre for the appendix), and there are bacteria all around us, and they just love moving into comfortable places like intestines. There are certain foods that will kill some bacteria but not others. One of the effects of yogurt is to get rid of many harmful bacteria, and garlic can kill nearly all bacteria, except for a few useful varieties.

The odiferous part of the gas so only a small part of the whole. Other factors are what gas dominates, Carbon dioxide or methane, and sometimes there is a significant amount of hydrogen sulfide, which smells really bad. There are bacteria that consume the waste products of other bacteria, but the waste product is a major variable in that. But aceto-bacteria consume the alcohol that yeast produces and then leave acetic acid as their waste product. Using that set of steps might be a good idea, but it wouldn’t get rid of the worst smells, which have sulfur as a component, and there aren’t many pleasant smelling compounds that include sulfur. It might be a better idea to find something that will trap the sulfur and keep it from making smelly compounds.

I think that I should find a chemist or a microbiologist to work on this. There is potential, but it will require years of research.