Oh no! I am not talking of politicians and bankers and the failed industries who seek bailouts. I am talking of something more insidious. They live in you and manipulate you. And you don't know about it.

We think of our body as the perfect feedback system. You get hurt in your knee, the skin breaks, and the area around the hurt becomes red. That are area is now being protected by the WBC in the blood. The redness comes from excessive blood in that area. The body has reacted. In other words a perfect feedback system.

Take another example. A foreign particle plans to enter your body through your nose. The body detects the intrusion and you sneeze. Wow! The foreign particle is ejected.

You accidentally touch something hot and before you realize your spinal cord has reacted and your hand is withdrawn. That's miracle of nature ... of our body.

So our body reacts to preserve itself. Or so I thought. Till I read Survival Of The Sickest by Dr. Sharon Moalem.

But what if some of our action - which we think as natural - are actually being triggered by germs and parasites.

You sneeze when you have cold. The purpose is to spread the germs to others and thereby ensuring that the cold virus get new hosts to flourish. Your sneezing is being forced by the organism. You scratch your backside sub-consciously. Actually it pinworms at make you do so. They then stick under your finger nails and wait for you to transmit to others as you shake hands. Yuck!

Let's take this further. What if our entire personality is dictated not by our genes but by the billions of germs that infest us? Indians love to eat spicy stuff. Is it because we have germs in our intestine that thrive on such food. A comparison of an Indian intestine with an English (bland food) should reveal this.

Kids like sweets. By the time we are adults some of us hate sweets. Perhaps, the child has germs that crave for sweets and they die by adulthood.

Some people get irascible by nature. Do they have germs that need regular doses of chemicals that gets dumped in our blood when we get angry?

Why do identical twins not have identical personality? Germs?

I could go on and on.

Nobel prize awaits this discovery. Meanwhile read the Survival Of the Sickest. To see another post on Survival of the Sickest, go here.