The hotel I’ve been staying at this week at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., markets its beds as being hypo-allergenic. As if that were possible. But let’s not fear microbes any longer. It is time to start embracing them. Resistance is futile anyway. They own us. The cells that make up our bodies are outnumbered within and on the surface of our skin by microorganisms by a factor of 10 to 1. There are trillions of them, and together with our own cells they make up what’s called the microbiome.