Awakening Your Consciousness For Better Healing

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Well, first of all, let me thank you and let me thank all the people who will have the patience to hear me and who will understand me, despite my broken English and a thick accent. Well, I was born in 1956 in Florence, Italy and you can tell from my accent. I graduated as a medical doctor over there in 1980. And then I move there for several years to the United States to work as a researcher in Forster, Burroughs Wellcome Co., North Carolina, Big Pharma, and then for the US government at the NIH in Bethesda. I was appointed a full professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Firenze. And over the years I have published more than 200 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals essentially dealing with two main topics of interest to oncology, that is the science of cancer and neurosciences. You may think that these are two fields that are separate, are different, and of course, they are. I mean, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease or multiple sclerosis apparently have nothing to do with each other and they do not have anything to do at the level of symptoms, at the level of disease, but they have much to do like all other diseases at the level of molecular biology. 

As I say, maybe I have said these, I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology. I was teaching molecular biology for some 30 years. And when you go at a DNA level you will find out that, for example, two completely different diseases like cancer, and actually there is not one cancer that at least 600 different types of cancer. Autism, and as well as autism, it is not one single disease, it is called a spectrum for a reason, two completely different things but at the molecular level if you look at the genes that are responsible or that are associated with both diseases you find striking similarities. That is where my background is and where does it come from? From a curiosity, interest. How it is possible that we only have 20,000 genes that are not that many and we are as complex as we think we are and we have diseases that are so different from each other but they have something in common. So what is this as something in common? And can we do something about this? Can we truly help in the fight against cancer or autism or all these neurodegenerative diseases? I could go on but I do not want to bore you because in almost 40 years of research and experiences and mistakes and a lot of mistakes I have learned a lot and I shall be happy to share all these with you but I try to summarize as best as I can.

Terry Wahls, MD

You know what I love about your comments right now, Marco, is that at the molecular level, are the root causes of these disorders whether it is cancer, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, have a great deal of similarities, and by addressing that root cause and focusing how we help our biology function more properly we often are able to show that many of these same approaches are helpful across many different disease states which actually drove my partners crazy at first when I started focusing all of the stuff. Now they are calling me this brilliant innovator and I am sure the same happened to you, Marco. Now we want to talk a little bit about consciousness and where is that located. Consciousness is in the brain? In our self? Where is my consciousness located?

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Well, this is a question that has afflicted philosophers for, I would say, thousands of years and maybe even earlier than that even Neanderthal man, maybe they ask themselves, what is the consciousness first, where it is located and where does it go when we terminate our lives on this earth? These are questions that are kind of the fundamental questions of life. Now, thanks to the rejuvenation of science in this field that for many, many, many years, if not millennia, have been relegated to philosophy. Now, a real scientist, when I say real scientist, I mean a physicist, a molecular biologists, medical doctors, now they are dealing with this problem. And actually, for the past, I think 27 some years here in Arizona you’re interviewing me and I am sitting in my office in the Pheonix metropolitan area in Arizona, well, not far from here in Tucson, there has been a conference on the science of consciousness going on for almost 30 years now with the participation of Nobel laureates including recently Sir Roger Penrose, that will go to his Nobel award, I think a couple of years ago. Now, all these scientists came to some very interesting and I would say surprising conclusions. 

We tended to think that our consciousness resides inside our brains. And our brains are more or less like computers, actually, as a matter of fact, artificial intelligence tries to mimic the workings of our brains, and the more we know about our brains, the more we know about AI, and vice versa. But there are some striking observations. The first one came out in the year 2007, and it was published in a famous medical journal called “The Lancet”, one of the most prestigious medical journals. And then over there some French researchers that they clearly demonstrated that we can live a perfectly normal life without having an anatomical brain. If you go to Lancet in the year 2007, this is publicly available, and look for a paper entitled “Brain of a White Collar Worker”, You will find this striking CAT scan and MRI images that showing that this man, a perfectly normal guy who underwent a CAT scan simply because he had a backache, I mean, a common ailment and serendipitously they found out that he had absolutely no brain inside his skull because of congenital malformations called hydrocephalus that had never been diagnosed. Scientists began to question, fine, if we can live without anatomically our brains, where does consciousness reside? And here came at first hypothesis by Professors Stuart Hameroff of Tucson, Arizona, and Sir Roger Penrose from England, a Nobel laureate recently. 

And they postulated that consciousness actually arises not in their synapses, that is the connections between the neurons and the sense of our brain but inside the cells in some tiny structure called microtubules, small tubules made of proteins by a quantum computation analysis. I mean, all these three words should merit an explanation that I am unable to give because I know very little if anything, about quantum or quanta. And quantum computation is something extremely difficult. Let us assume that some quantum mysterious phenomena occur inside these cells of our brains and we do not need many cells, that is how they explained that people without brain could function perfectly well. This is called hypothesis orchestrated objective reduction hypothesis, you can go to Wikipedia and you will find a lot about it. But more recently actually, I had the honor and privilege to attend and speak at the conference in Tucson last year. More recently, it has been demonstrated that actually, consciousness occurs at the level of DNA. Now this opens a completely nobel perspective because everything that has ever been alive on this earth is made of DNA. Actually, DNA is the common universal molecule that up until now, we say, contains genetic information and this is obviously true. But now we know that also inside DNA these are computer quantum computational phenomena occur. 

Now, why does this open a completely normal perspective? Because in the meantime also another discovery was made that is equally important, microbes. Up until 20 years ago you wanted to get rid of all the microbes you met so you wanted to exterminate all microbes. Microbes are enemies and actually, some of them they are. I mean viruses, bacteria, spirochete, fungi, and protists they could cause diseases. Definitely, you want to sterilize as much as you can but only up to a certain point because now we know that we are made of microbes. Actually, there are books entitled “10% Human”. What do they mean? That I am a human being and I am made of a human cells and I have a certain number of human cells. But if I counted the number of microbial cells, bacteria, fungi, and viruses even that are inside my body, in my gut, in my mouth, in all my skin, everywhere, then these are number of microbial cells is ten times higher than the number of human cells. Am only one cent human and a nine and tenth are microbial cells. And something very new and I am sure you are aware of them maybe most of the audience is not is that we have of microbes not only in our gut, the gut microbiota has always been not in our nose, in our mouths but we also have microbes inside our brains. 

Now, this is kind of new. It was first observed serendipitously in 2013 by Canadian researchers who were working on HIV and AIDS, completely unrelated to the field and they were looking for microbes in the brains of people who had died of AIDS and they found those microbes that go on the brain because of the immune system because the immune system is not working in AIDS, but they also found microbes in the brains of perfectly healthy people. And so that is how ten years ago the concept of a brain microbiota actually was the first to publish a scientific article, what I mentioned, the brain microbiota came out. Just like everybody knows now that we need microbes in our intestines because they help with digestion, they help with production of vitamins of neurotransmitters, and so on. Now we are realizing that we also need the microbes inside our brains.

Terry Wahls, MD

Stop. This is a very momentous declaration, everyone. That the microbes in our brain have a useful role to play and we should not be necessarily afraid of them. We have to learn how to live and have a collaborative relationship, I presume. Now, Marco, I am going to have you continue. But that is a very exciting and very interesting statement that you have made.

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Thank you. Well, actually, I was not the first to discover the microbes in our brains. And I say that Canadian researchers have worked on this field since 2013. But I was the first to postulate an association between disruption of what we now call the brain microbiome, that is the array of microbes inside of our brains. Disruption of this abundance of microbes and neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis, autism, Alzheimer’s, and neurodegenerative diseases. Actually, this was an easy exercise of logic. Because we now know that if we disrupt our gut microbiome, for example, by taking antibiotics something bad occurs not only at the level of the gut but at the level of the immune system, for example. I mean, it is only logical that if we disrupt or we alter the balance of the microbes inside our brain something bad might happen. As a matter of fact, quite recently it was demonstrated that in the brains of people with multiple sclerosis, the biodiversity of the brain microbiome is much lower exactly as it happens during diseases of the gut such as Crohn’s disease or other chronic conditions of the gut. 

Terry Wahls, MD

Marco, so, Marco, if things are disrupted in my brain because I have MS. Are there strategies that I can use to help bring my brain microbiome into better balance?

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

It is the easiest thing on the planet. What do you do when your gut microbiome is disrupted because, for example, you had to take some antibiotics, you take a lactic acid fermented or lactic acid bacteria, you take a yogurt or a kefir. It is so simple. And based on this we developed an approach that is based on an entire microbiome transplant, if you want to call it so, because now we know exactly which microbes are resident in the brain, in the healthy brain. We know that during neurodegenerative disease, it is a chronic disease, the balance of these microbes is altered and we know that their biodiversity is reduced exactly as it happens during chronic conditions with the gut.

Terry Wahls, MD

Okay. You got me sold. I want to sign up. How do I get a better microbiome?

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Well, there are many probiotics, actually. There are thousands of probiotics on sale, you go to your local grocery store and you find it on their shelves. What we did there was to develop something that is a little bit more than that. I do not know if you are familiar with the field of autism. Now, in autism, it had always been postulated that there was a link between disruption of the gut microbiome and autism. But up until recently, it was thought that this was because we know the gut microbiome is involved with the immune system and also with the production of neurotransmitters. It was thought that it was kind of an indirect action. About ten years ago, a very good friend of mine who unfortunately passed away, Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, who was at the time the undisputed authority in the world of autism, talked about our approach, he say that Marco’s approach, I do not want here to make kind of a commercial advertisement, you will find out what my approach is called, but I can tell is bravo which in Italian means good and that is the name of our approach. 

And he said Bravo is much more than a probiotic, it is an entire ecosystem. And that is what we did, we reconstituted the ecosystem of microbes plus what is called nowadays the theater of activities that is everything that the microbes produce proteins, sugars, fats, vitamins, and neurotransmitters. And we reconstituted these under the form of something that is edible, you can eat it. And you eat these microbes together with their theater of activity and they go in our gut as usual. But we also introduce something that activates a sense of the immune system like macrophages. And these macrophages they bring the microbes into the brain. Because they constantly, this is a traffic of activated macrophages and activated lymphocytes, it is a continuous recirculation. And they work like trojan horses, they bring the microbes with them and they deliver the microbes inside the brain. Essentially by reconstituting the microbiome of the gut which is our approach of ours and by stimulating the macrophages we reconstitute also the brain microbiota. And we have a plenty of clinical evidence that this leads to an improvement, for example, in autism, for example, in neurodegenerative conditions. 

Here it is like the egg and the chicken, nobody knows which comes first, nobody knows whether first to comes at the neurological condition, and then the microbiome is disrupted or the other way around, nobody knows this. But we all know now that all chronic conditions are associated with a disruption of the microbiome, the same happens for the skin, for example, it is everywhere in our bodies. If we reconstitute the microbiome for the skin, for example. there are skin probiotics, and they do work probiotics for the gut. And now we also have probiotics for the brain. These definitely reestablished the balances and this helps. 

Going back to your first question, this is where things have become truly interesting if consciousness is located in DNA, microbes, they do have DNA, are microbes conscious? And nowadays the answer is definitely, yes. Are microbes intelligent? The answer is definitely, yes. If you wish I can send the papers not published by me, absolutely not, by esteemed scientists that would talk about bacterial intelligence. And they demonstrate that not only microbes are intelligent using whatever definition of intelligence that we like to use for us humans it applies to microbes as well, exactly. But they also, unlike what humans do many times, they cooperate with each other. They cooperate probably much better than what we do as humans. They also fight each other and it is good in a sense because if they fight our enemies, they are our friends and that is actually what happens. Microbes are intelligent. Microbes, they do have consciousness and this has been thoroughly demonstrated. Now, the point now comes to another war that it is kind of mysterious, entanglement. Since microbes do live inside our brains, in our guts, and everywhere in our bodies, and since microbes they have consciousness, is there and consciousness entangled with, our, according to some preliminary observation, the answer is yes. And that actually.

Terry Wahls, MD

Hang on, Marco. This is such an interesting statement. They want to clarify it for everyone. I think Marco just said that the consciousness that I have is a cooperation between the DNA in my brain and the microbial DNA residing in my brain. Did I get that right?

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Exactly. And you were able to express these in much less worse than I have been able to do. And I appreciate summarizing it so well and so correctly what I am desperately trying to say. Then let us think about these, today I am giving you a number of information that I hope are new and interesting. As I said at the beginning of this conversation we humans are made of roughly 20000 to 22000 genes. There are 22,000 pieces of information in our human DNA. And we are the way we are because of our genes. And we transmit these genes to our progeny and we receive them from our ancestors, basic genetic. How many genes are there in their collective human microbiome, in the microbes that we have in our bodies, how many? Nobody knows for sure but according to some estimates, the number of microbial genes is of the same order of magnitude of the atoms in the entire universe, not a lethal number. I think it is called Eddington number, the number of atoms in the universe are 10 to the 80, eight zero. The number of microbial genes, only for humans, let us not talk about dogs and cats and plants and everything else that is on this planet, and the number of microbial genes in the collective human microbiome according to some estimates is equal to the number of atoms in the universe. We truly are cosmic objects, we are small,  and our microbes are even smaller. But the amount of information is so astronomical we could say that this requires a complete change of paradigm of the way we think. 

To answer your question, where is our consciousness located? Well, most likely not in our brains even though our brains are there, they work and they perform all the functions that neurologists have described for decades if not centuries but we can do without brains and it means that our consciousness is kind of diffuse. Now let us move to some even more exotic concept that is consciousness as something intrinsic to the universe, as oriental religions have always said for the past 3000 years or so, what it appears are so, because according to the philosopher David Chalmers, consciousness is also in those particles like atoms, or neutrons, or even subatomic particles, quarks and neutrinos, whatever. Now, if consciousness is intrinsic to the universe, could it be that our brains or our bodies simply tap into the intrinsic consciousness of the universe and the microbes because of their astronomical number? The astronomical number of genes on the microbes that they truly help in these, like if you seem too nice. Let us say our bodies are like radio receivers or C emitters and synthesize into the intrinsic consciousness of the universe, could this be the case that explains a lot of things? Well, let us move for a second. I see that you are muted. Maybe I am. Now that you are muted not electronically that you are not speaking, as you.

Terry Wahls, MD

Yeah. I am hearing, I am fascinated. I am like, oh, my gosh. And I am going to interrupt for a moment, Marco. I love science fiction. And one of the stories that I loved was that the pilots were traveling the universe in living starships and I have come to realize that you and I are the living starship and the bacteria that reside in us are guiding us through the universe co-mingling our bacteria, and the bacteria and viruses have been around for billions of years longer than multicellular organisms, and we may be servants to them in ways that we have never even contemplated. And as I listen to you, I am like, oh, my God, that is so true, that science fiction described a reality that we have this very cooperative relationship with our microbes and that we may be serving them at a higher level. And I am going to hand this back to you. This is such an interesting conversation.

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

This is true but it is also true the other way around. It is not only that we are like a vehicle to transport the microbes but also the microbes that help us most likely not only on this earth but whatever happens next. Now, this might become metaphysical so I stopped here. But I wanted to go to something much more mundane. We all know and I think this is century-old information that there are electrical signals in our brains, I mean, the electroencephalogram. Now, every time electrical particles move there is an associated that magnetic field. We emit continuously electromagnetic fields. And this can be measured, it is called magneto electroencephalography is something that is measured and nothing fancy or exotic here. Let us say that roughly we have a hundred billion neuron cells in our brains, we can say that we have a hundred billion transmitters of electromagnetic fields. And again, this is not science fiction this is something that is measured on a daily basis in clinical settings. We observe 100 billion receivers because everything that transmits also receives. 

Our DNA is a structure as a fractal antenna that is able to send and receive electromagnetic signals. Here we are still in the real amount of classical physics, Maxwell type not quantum here. Could it be that simply we continuously tap into the consciousness of the universe and we receive information from the consciousness of the universe simply through radio waves, simple, easy radio waves known for more than 100 years, could it be? Well, certainly it is. And some experiments that they do demonstrate that we are even sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field, it is very weak. But the same magnetic field that moves the needle of the compass moves the things inside our brains and we are sensitive to that. Actually, also, these ones demonstrated no more than one year ago, actually, it was a PH student,  a very young girl who presented these astonishing results at the conference in Tucson last year. Now, if we then go down to the quantum level, a quantum level is always something mysterious and fascinating up to the point that Einstein himself, called it the fictitious spooky phenomena at a distance, spooky action of this stuff. 

Now, if we go down to the quantum level then our consciousness and the consciousness of microbes is entangled. And entanglement goes beyond to space and time, this means that it remains entangled essentially forever or as long as the universe exists. These are then open to perspectives about what happens to our consciousness after we leave this earth. Well, if we think that our consciousness is as somehow entangled with that of microbes. Microbes, they stay, they remain after our bodies are gone and they were here before as you say. This opens up a number of perspectives. And I ended my presentation in Tucson saying something that maybe did not make many people happy, I say, well, if we consider, and it was a kind of a technical presentation, kind of complicated and because it involved the entanglement between the microbes and the Orch OR theory of human consciousness, the professor’s job. 

But at the end of my presentation, I said, well, if we consider the microbial involvement, then the topic of the persistence of consciousness beyond our bodies, becomes more a microbiological problem than a philosophical problem. I brought things down to earth. This is not much philosophy it is microbiology which is much more mundane than philosophy. And probably people were not happy when I say these words but it could be. Microbes were here before we were here as humans or as mammals or as fish and they will be here, I mean, they can survive in outer space, and probably they travel in the face of comets, it is kind of fascinating. And going back to very trivial and mundane things that we tried with our approach that actually all our research and development and even manufacture products, of course, in Switzerland which is kind of a strange place for exotic things. With our approach of reconstituting the brain microbiome, we are trying from our legal angle or our legal perspective to tap in this consciousness of the universe.

Terry Wahls, MD

This is such an amazing conversation that is really shifting how I am thinking about health in my self-care program. I am like, okay, I am totally on. Well, several things, Marco. One is I hope you are writing a book for the lay public. This is such an interesting topic. I know I want to read that book and I want to come to your, I am going to have to start reading your scientific papers. You have such an interesting outlook on the brain, health, vitality, and the things that all of us could be doing to support my brain health. And I am thinking, at the very least, I am going to be eating a lot more fermented foods. With every meal I usually eat about a pint a day of kimchi and sauerkraut maybe I need to up that to a quart and increase my diversity here. And I am going to see what you are up to in terms of the brain microbiome products that you have helped develop. This is just so interesting and such a novel and profound understanding of, I would say, the very latest science on brain health and vitality.

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Thank you so much for your kind words. As a matter of fact, I already wrote a book but it is ten years old now, but the title, it is called “Your Third Brain”. I think you can find it on Amazon.

Terry Wahls, MD

“Your Third Brain”.

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

“Your Third Brain”. Because at that time I thought we had three brains, now I know we have four. And actually, I gave an interview to a Spanish magazine a few years ago, the name also “Cuatro Cerebros”, we have four brains, what are these four brains? One, first of all, the first brain the one we have inside the skulls, fine. The second brain, the so-called enteric nervous system that are the neurons embedded in the walls of our GI tract from the mouth to the anus, a huge number of neurons interconnected and connected with our brains inside our schools, and this is called the second brain. I did not designate it, it is no second brain. And then the third brain, I thought at that time were the microbes in our guts because at that time I did not know much about the microbes inside their brains, so I said they are the third brain because they do produce the neurotransmitters like GABA or dopamine, a number of other neurotransmitters, and they do affect our first brain and second brain. As a matter of fact, by changing the gut microbiome you change your mood. People are talking about psycho-biotics, you can change the mood, you can change the attitude, you can change a number of things. I thought that is the third brain and this is where the title of the book came from. 

And then and now I say, well, what about the microbes inside our brain? They are our fourth brain. And maybe the fourth brain is, let us say, the most important of all. In science, there is nothing more important than research, but at least it is the newest and we know very little about it. But the microbes inside our brains with the entanglement over their consciousness with our, as I say, they open a completely new perspective. And I feel that we may be on the verge or we already are in a completely new era of medicine and this is not even mentioning the viruses. The human virome is even more complex and more biodiverse than the microbiome, well, they belong to the microbiome because they are microbes in a sense, but we know absolutely nothing about the human virome, very little.

Well, let me tell you this, in our approach, we took care also of the viruses. In our products we not only have the lactic acid bacteria and bifidobacterium, very good things but we also have their microbes, they are called the phages bacteriophages. And they are the microbiome of the microbiome because the microbes themselves they need those viruses inside them to protect them against pathogenic viruses. And we integrated all of these, that is why I relate Dr. Bresee call it to an entire ecosystem, not simply a couple of probiotics but an entire ecosystem, viruses, the consciousness of viruses. You know that there are viruses that are bigger than bacteria, it is called mimivirus. And it may be they are the ancestors of our chromosomes. Maybe the eukaryotic cells that these human cells or the cells of the dogs of all the eukaryotic cells they came from the fusion of ancestral bacterial cells and ancestral viruses like the mimivirus, was discovered in Marseilles, France. And the DNA of the mimivirus, or something similar to that, formed the primitive chromosomes from which our chromosome derives. We can say that our DNA, our chromosomes is a viral origin. I mean, there are several studies supporting this theory. You see how things are changing.

Terry Wahls, MD

Marco, this has been so amazing. I could spend the rest of the day and probably the rest of the week engaged in this wonderful conversation, learning so much from you. What I would like to have you do, though, is tell all of our listeners what is the one thing you hope them that they would get from this really wonderful conversation we have had.

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Well, to change the angle that you use to look at your hands when we have problems with our health most likely they are due to imbalances, this is a very old concept. The Chinese medicine and Oriental philosophy is based on this. I am not against antibiotics or chemotherapy for cancer. Actually, I have a specialization in radiology. I know very well about radiotherapy and when it is needed it works very well. But in a broader sense, by re-establishing the balance of the different components of our bodies and including, and maybe foremost, the microbiome might be a great help. What I am saying the core message of my talk, is we are much more complex than what modern science or modern medicine wants us to believe. We are simply observing the tip of the iceberg from a distance. We are not even close to that iceberg and we know that we are only observing the tip. Most about our bodies, the way we function, the way we develop diseases are unknown, we know many things but most are unknown. 

And most likely the microbiome plays a big role, a fundamental role and we are discovering this now. Most likely our consciousness is all intermingled or entangled. The core message is to look at your health from a different perspective, take into consideration the role of the microbiome, do your own research, and just look for microbiome medicine, you will find a lot of information. If you want to know about my research go to Google Scholar, you can go to the regular Google but Google Scholar is more focused. Go to Google Scholar and type in my name and you will find everything from papers to patent applications, to books, everything else, and everything that is in between. And of course, if you have any questions please write me. I will pass all my contacts and I should be happy to at least try to answer any questions you may have.

Terry Wahls, MD

Okay. Well, Marco, this has been one of the most amazing conversations I have had. I want to thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed and for the amazing work that you do.

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Thank you. Thank you so much. It has been an honor and a privilege talking with you. And I hope I have been able to convey even a little part of our message.

Terry Wahls, MD

Thank you, Marco.

Marco Ruggiero, MD, PhD

Thank you.