Microbes invade Mexico City

The dean of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) , Enrique Graue Wiechers, has opened the exhibition The Secret World Inside You , the largest microbe exhibition in the world. It is a tour of the human body where visitors will be able to explore it and discover the vast amount of microorganisms living within, on, and around all human beings, and how microbes affect our health.

Originally from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the exhibition will be open to the public at the Museum of Sciences, Universum , until December 30, 2017.

Universum will show us this other unseen world, the world “ within ” that until relatively a few years ago, human beings have begun to understand, explained the dean.

It appears that microbes differ depending on how a baby is born – through the birth canal or by cesarean section – and whether we are thin or fat depends also on the bacteria living in our intestine.

“Yes, there is a great future in the research of human microbiota: it will allow us to be more knowledgeable about diseases, its causes, and eventually, a way to prevent them. That is what this exhibition is about, to awaken an interest in the world living within us, a world with which we come into contact every day and on which we depend,” said David Kershenobich, general director of the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition Salvador Zubirán.

The exhibition is an opportunity to stimulate the imagination of children and adults alike, and to plant the first seeds of ideas that in the upcoming years may turn into scientific progress, he added.

Finally, Graue said this exhibition opens the 25th-anniversary celebrations of Universum, which currently receives 500 thousand visitors, and trusts that many students – from elementary school up to college – will continue visiting the museum which, he hopes, awakens in them a scientific vocation.

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