
When Martha Carlin’s 44-year-old marathon-running husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2002, she applied her auditor’s mindset to examining the evidence behind this “old person’s disease.” What followed was a remarkable 20+ year journey from studying food toxins to pioneering targeted probiotic therapies. In this episode, Martha shares how she discovered the connection between gut bacteria and Parkinson’s symptoms, developed probiotics that significantly improved her husband’s condition, and is now working on therapies for Crohn’s disease and post-antibiotic gut restoration. She also reveals the hidden dangers of glyphosate, explains why the “magic bullet” approach fails for complex diseases, and discusses the future of microbiome medicine.
With gratitude,
Martha Carlin, is a “Citizen Scientist”,
systems thinker, wife of Parkinson’s warrior, John Carlin, and founder of The BioCollective , a microbiome company expanding
the reach of science and BiotiQuest, the first of it’s kind probiotic line. Since John’s diagnosis in 2002,
Martha began learning the science of agriculture, nutrition, environment, infectious disease, Parkinson’s
pathology and much more. In 2014, when the first research was published showing a connection between the gut
bacteria and the two phenotypes of Parkinson’s, Martha quit her former career as a business turnaround expert
and founded The BioCollective to accelerate the discovery of the impact of gut health on all human disease. Martha was a speaker at the White House 2016 Microbiome Initiative launch, challenging the scientific
community to “think in a broader context”. Her systems thinking background and experience has led to collaborations
across the scientific spectrum from neuroscience to engineering to infectious disease. She is a respected out of the
box problem solver in the microbiome field and brings a unique perspective to helping others understand the
connections from the soil to the food to our guts and our brains.
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Martha Carlin