MIT Experts Study Sewage To Learn About Locals

What does a city's waste tell you about its residents? Potentially a lot, according to a new research project by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

"The researchers—who include architects, computational biologists, designers, electrical and mechanical engineers, geneticists, and microbiologists—[are] testing an idea that’s attracting interest around the world: namely, that sewage can tell us important things about the people who excrete it," the Boston Globe recently reported. 

Previous research indicates that waste contains data about drug use, the spread of disease, and the general state of public health, according to the report. This study is more in-depth, and it is the first to focus on these local waste systems.

Yaniv Jacob Turgeman, a graduate student at MIT who is working on the research, refers to the project as "Underworlds."

“The sewage system is the world underneath the one we inhabit and interact. Its infrastructure aggregates our collective metabolic activities, and is a waste stream rich with biomedical information that can be useful from a public health perspective,” Turgeman said, per the Daily Beast. “Just as how our nervous systems sense our information in our gastrointestinal tract, Underworlds aims to extend the ability to understand our health by sensing the gut of the city.”

The major testing phase of the experiment is expected to occur this winter. 

In January, researchers made plans to "gather around a manhole on Portland Street in East Cambridge, dressed in plastic disposable biohazard coats and gloves. Each hour over the next 24, working in teams of two over four-hour shifts, they’ll sink a tube into the muck and pump one to two liters of sewage water into a plastic container. The container will be put into a cooler and taken to the nearby lab at MIT run by Eric Alm, a computational microbiologist," the Boston Globe report said. 

Researchers will test the samples for viruses, bacteria, and biomarkers that reveal diseases and drug use, the report said. 

"Most of what's going in and out of a city is the water going in and sewage coming out," Alm said, per CNN. "The change in water in and out reflects a broad array of human activity going on in a city." 

Carlo Ratti, an architect working on MIT's sewage efforts, explained the potential value of this research. 

"We can reveal the invisible in a city. The underworld we don't see every day," he said, per CNN. "New techniques in biology allow us to characterize bacteria and viruses leaving our bodies. [This is] the microbiome of us."

This avenue of research could ultimately "see epidemics before they happen," he said.