Thoughts on bacteria

Just read a few things that have got my mind in a pondering state. Basically, it's about the role of bacteria in our identity. This is the article that kicked off the latest thoughts:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_body_politic/

Now, I also listened to a presentation, related to this:

http://www.suchnessspa.com/Articles/candace_pert.htm

Putting the two together, the chemical messages described in the first article sound awfully like the neuropeptides that Candace Pert talks about, which are used by the various organs within our body to communicate. If bacteria are doing the same thing, are they like another set of organs in our body, affecting our mood, our health, our energy levels?

Now, I'm very much a layperson when it comes to these things, so I ponder the implications from a point of ignorance. But my musings interest me, at least...

San pointed out that the onset of autism is often after a severe bout of sickness. When sick, often the body will raise its internal temperature, causing a fever. As I understand it, this is to make the body deliberately inhospitable to other organisms, killing them off, hopefully before our body itself dies. When falling ill, do we lose certain cultures of bacteria that affect our moods and abilities?

San has often mentioned how newborn children that are left to themselves in maternity wards have a much higher mortality rate than those that are held and cuddled. The first article mentioned how we pick up most of our bacterial symbionts in the first few years of life. I wonder how much mortality is a result of not picking up the symbionts we need to survive in time?

It also undermines the sci fi staple of storing genetic material and cloning animals after they've gone extinct. If bacteria play such an important role in our health, does this mean cloning an animal's DNA is insufficient? Do we need to also include a broad sample of bacteria that commonly live with those animals? While the cloning process for bacteria is nowhere near as complex, as they do it themselves if the conditions are right, restoring extinct animals may not be feasible without their bacterial symbionts.

How much of our identity comes about as a result of our little friends? And what are the implications for better understanding of the effects they have? Will we be able to cure conditions in the future by taking a tablet and rebalancing our internal colonies?

Moving into the fanciful, imagine that psychic powers, which are so often intricately involved with our moods, are actually due to the impact of certain bacterial colonies? Or the morphic resonance of two bacterial colonies with a shared history or ancestry leading to a closer link between two people?

There's a lot more to the subject, these thoughts are only scratching the surface but I wanted to get them down before I got distracted.