This is silly. I've already found multiple donors good enough for a near-complete cure, and I still have access to all the 1.5 million+ donors who've applied, and I'm still screening and using more.
If you have found multiple donors good enough for a near-complete cure, then I'd gather that you're nearly completely cured? If so, why are you still looking for more donors? Are you looking to go from "nearly completely" cured to "completely" cured? Or are you accepting that the donors who you claim are good enough to cure you may not cure everyone, and are still looking for donors who might cure everyone?
No. This is a conclusion arrived at due to missing pieces of info. Most of the info is public, so I won't elaborate.
Ok, so if most info is public, could you arrange the data (graphs, tables, etc.) in such a way so as to justify to someone that you were on the way to eventually finding a super-donor at the point in time at which you stopped sharing data?
What I mean is something like this:
--Take all HM donors tried by at least 5 recipients, from the date that HM started operating to the date at which it was shut down.
--Calculate the average recipient rating (out of 10) across all recipients for each of these donors, and note the year in which this donor passed the interview/stool screening process (or month if you can get that specific).
--From this you are able to calculate/plot, for each year, the average rating of the best donor who joined HM thus far (either in that year or a previous year).
--Together with the approximate number of prospective donors per year, this should allow you to calculate how many prospective donors needed to be screened as a function of the best donor found. In other words, how many donors needed to be screened to find at least one who averaged above 5/10, how many to find one who averaged above 6/10, etc.
--One we agree on how to define a "universal super-donor", say for example someone with an average rating of 9/10 or more, a bit of statistics should allow someone to extrapolate the trend from the previous step to determine the
expected number of prospective donors needing to be screened to find such a super-donor. Is this less than the population of the developed world? Does it fit within the 1.5 million-ish donors you've screened already? If not, is there a publicly disclosable change to your method of search since HM closed that could justify doing better than this expectation?
I would have done the above myself, but the earliest copy of the results spreadsheet that I have downloaded and saved is from 2024 when I first ordered from HM. That was after (if I recall, actually quite
soon after) the sheet was cleaned up to remove results from donors prior to UT-AW and FL-RS who were no longer active. CozyFire was in there but he only shipped to NZ, which could skew things, and also BuddingBear but we all agree he was a bad donor who in no way surpassed these others. I also don't know if those were interviewed before or after UT-AW and FL-RS.
As far as I know, the only "evidence" you have presented in favor of the fact that you might have been approaching a super-donor (aside from the non-public N=1 results) is the fact that there were higher-ranked donors than the ones people had already used at the time that HM was shut down. But what did you do if anything to validate this ranking?
The recently published study regarding super-donors in the IBS trial (
https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/a-simulation-of-2-548-gut-transplants-identified-two-super-donors-with.1456/) did leave-one-out cross-validation of their metabolic metric. Keep in mind that in order to even be validat
able, a ranking needs to either be "
objective" (based on a publicly-disclosed formula, such that anyone given, e.g. the interview answers and the Bristol stool numbers of each interviewee's stools could arrive at the same or very close to the same ranking), or else
prospective rather than
retrospective, i.e. the ranking would need to be "frozen" before the donors are actually tried by the recipients by giving a public copy to someone else for safekeeping and then the results compared to the ranks later.
Without such statistical support, all we have to go on is that ~1 million applicants in, the best donor so far, who seemed to have been the best for quite some time, was definitely NOT a universal super-donor. And from such a fact, IsthmusSIBO's deduction about it being like the holy grail is far from "silly".
Think about it like this--if you are seeking funding for FMT experiments, you need to imagine you're trying to convince someone who isn't biased
against your hypotheses about stool type and consistency and such, but also isn't coming into the game being biased
toward them.
