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What does Cambridge sewage sayabout residents? MIT plans to findoutA new project aims to understand a city’s health and habitsthrough its waste
By Michael Fitzgerald GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 09, 2015
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LESLEY BECKER/GLOBE STAFF
SOMETIME IN MID to late January, researchers from MIT plan 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.
Alm’s lab will analyze all 24 of these sludgy samples to see what viruses and bacteria
they hold;; meanwhile, a vial of each sample will be sent to another lab to be analyzed
for biomarkers (molecular or cellular flags for things like diseases and drugs, legal
and illegal ).
These researchers—who include architects, computational biologists, designers,
electrical and mechanical engineers, geneticists, and microbiologists—will be testing
an idea that’s attracting interest around the world: namely, that sewage can tell us
important things about the people who excrete it. Already, research has shown that
sewage can reveal illicit drug usage, the presence of influenza, the poliovirus and
other pathogens, and the state of community health. So far, however, none of this has
been tested in our local waste systems, other than some proof-of-concept sampling
done in Boston. That has led to this first formal effort by scientists and public health
officials to get a sewage snapshot of the people of Cambridge.
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Historically, public health officials have been stuck following their gut. “A problem in
public health is we are plagued by not having good metrics,” says Sam Lipson,
director of environmental health in the Cambridge Public Health Department, which
is facilitating the research. An exception would be the well-documented health
hazards of lead paint. But for many other substances, effects are unclear, and morally
and logistically, city officials “can’t engage in controlled experiments,” Lipson says.
He hopes the new research will lead to better data around issues like diet and
wellness.
The MIT researchers have dubbed their project Underworlds, and it will run from
2015 through 2017, thanks to a $4 million grant through the Kuwait-MIT Center for
Natural Resources and the Environment. Along with Alm, the research is being led by
Carlo Ratti, an architect and engineer who is a professor at MIT and runs the
Senseable Cities Lab, which studies how the physical and digital worlds blend. Yaniv
J. Turgeman, an architect getting dual master’s degrees at MIT in design and
computation and in environmental microbiology, is the research director, along with
Mariana Matus, an MIT PhD candidate in computational biology. Students and
professors at four other MIT labs will be involved in the project, as well as
researchers from Kuwait University and the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research.
“Sewage is really an unexploited source of rich information about human activities,”
Alm says. And why not? Trash dumps provide treasure troves for archaeologists
looking to find out how ordinary people lived. Our sewage, with chemical information
that comes straight out of our own bodies, should be even more informative.
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2011: Something in thewaterWhat drugs are local residents abusing? A
researcher’s solution to that vexing problem
suggests just how much our sewage knows about us.
Matus says the Underworlds project will test for three main things. It will screen for
viruses, like influenza, noroviruses, or enteroviruses such as polio or the nasty
respiratory flu called D68;; for bacterial pathogens like those that cause cholera or
typhoid fever;; and for biomarkers, or biochemical molecules, which include
pharmaceutical drugs like antibiotics, illicit drugs such as cocaine or
methamphetamines, and isoprostanes, which are compounds produced by the body
and seen as a proxy for societal stress and disease levels. Data on such substances
could predict epidemics or tell when they’re waning. They could also demonstrate the
impact of shifts in regulations, such as bans on using trans fat in restaurants.
First, though, the researchers have to figure out what time of day sewage is at its best.
Good sewage involves a maximum of toilet water and a minimum of detergents,
soaps, and other things that scrub out information. “We want the time when we see
the most human waste in the system, the most diverse hour for sewage,” says Newsha
Ghaeli, an architect who came to MIT in 2014 as a research fellow and is the
Underworlds project manager. (She concedes that she endures endless puns about
her research.) Finding prime sewage time is the reason that they’ll spend that initial
testing day taking samples once every hour, as well as some secondary samples at a
nearby Cambridge manhole that draws sewage from the Portland Street
neighborhood and a second, less residential neighborhood.
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The data from these initial samples will be used to help develop the Underworlds
software platform, which MIT is building to help analyze sewage information across a
detailed map of Cambridge’s sewers, correlating the data with demographic
information such as ethnic mix and average age. Then, in the second phase of the
research, the team will take samples from 10 sites in Cambridge (six residential
neighborhoods, two industrial neighborhoods, and at Harvard and MIT) over an
eight- to twelve-month period. At this point, they will no longer have to gather
sewage samples by hand. Instead, MIT researchers are building 4-foot-high robotic
sewage samplers that can process and analyze the sewage, the data from which will
feed directly into the software platform.
The Cambridge tests will lead to one in Kuwait City, which the team expects to launch
in 2017. As in Cambridge, Kuwaiti officials want sewage tests to look for viral and
bacterial presences and to measure the impact of public policy. They also want to be
able to screen for biochemical threats.
What can be done with the data that will emerge? Public health officials might gain
information that helps them fight disease, and doctors might be able to care for
patients more effectively. Lipson says he’ll be curious to see if the tests find
hazardous wastes, not so much from Cambridge’s vaunted biotech firms, whose
discharges are closely regulated, but by other businesses, which are not.
One hindrance to integrating sewage sampling into public policy is the cost. The
filters that are used to capture bacterial, viral, and molecular substances cost tens of
thousands of dollars, meaning it will be expensive to test all the neighborhoods in a
large city. MIT is building its own prototypes, which have to be waterproof and able
to be remotely controlled. Eventually, such projects will be able to save money by
testing for a narrower range of substances. Still, Alm thinks private companies will
have to form in order to help achieve the necessary scale for sewage to shape public
policy.
Another concern could be the extension of the surveillance state into the sewers. But
it will not be easy to trace waste products, even those with legal implications (from
illicit substances, for example), back to any individual toilet-flusher. The first test
neighborhood in East Cambridge has just over 4,000 people in it, and none of the
neighborhoods that will be tested will have fewer than 2,000 people. Turgeman, the
research lead, said via e-mail there will be no way to link results to individual homes
or buildings.
Someday, though, he hopes people have the option to buy smart toilets outfitted with
sensors that measure what passes through them. Turgeman is working on making a
certain porcelain god more omniscient. If we choose to connect a smart toilet to the
Internet, we run a real risk of flushing our privacy. Until then, there are traces of all
of us in the sewers—and those will tell a different, more collective story.
Michael Fitzgerald is a freelance journalist who writes from Cambridge.
Related:
• The city is an ecosystem, pipes and all
• What ‘urban physics’ could tell us about how cities work
• 2013: The too-smart city
• 2013: The DNA in your garbage: up for grabs
• 2012: Our underground future
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