Gardner felt healthy, but he decided to check himself for parasites, as one looks for ticks after a hike. He put a sample of his own feces on a microscope slide and peered through the glass. Immediately, he was shocked: Hidden within the sample were clusters of tiny, light-yellow eggs.

“I’m used to looking at that with regular animals,” says Gardner. “But I’m not a regular animal—I’m me!”

It’s a shame that parasitology isn’t more “popular”, just from a discovery standpoint there’s a lot of potential for all sorts of eg. immunomodulatory drugs there, and I have a vague memory that there’s already clinical trials underway for a drug related to autoimmune diseases that was derived from how some parasite shuts off parts of the host immune system