You shit. I shit. Your grandma shits. EVERYONE shits. But most people don’t make money for shitting.
Well, I suppose all the folks who take 45-min heaters at work would argue otherwise. But they’re not earning extra money, they’re just slackers who’d rather spend 25 minutes playing Candy Crush with numb legs over plugging meaningless numbers into a meaningless spreadsheet. For some, that’s the best 45 minutes of their day. And who am I to marginalize that?
Point is, they don’t make money for that loaf, but they could be. You could be. We all could be!
OpenBiome, a nonprofit with a focus on fecal microbiota transplantation therapies, wants to pay people for their healthy shit. What is fecal microbiota transplantation therapies, you ask?
Great question.
Rather than trying to explain the process, which involves your healthy shit being transplanted into a person who has C. difficile, I’ll just let the The Washington Post take it from here:
The frozen stool is administered to patients who are very sick with infections of a bacteria called C. difficile. The bacteria can cause extreme gastrointestinal distress, leaving some sufferers housebound. Antibiotics often help, but sometimes the bacteria rears back as soon as treatment stops. That leads to a miserable, continuous course of antibiotics.
By introducing healthy fecal matter into the gut of a patient (by way of endoscopy, nasal tubes, or swallowed capsules) doctors can abolish C. difficile for good. Finding a donor is tough business, and some patients grow so desperate that they treat themselves with fecal matter from friends and family. That’s what happened to a friend of OpenBiome’s founders, inspiring them to open up the first nationwide bank. So far they’ve shipped about 2,000 treatments to 185 hospitals around the country.
So how do you make scratch from your scat?
First you have to have super healthy shit. I don’t know what makes one beefpile more healthy than the next, but the geniuses at OpenBiome do. They won’t take just any geek off the street (Warren G reference). Your dookie needs to be pristine. The cofounder of OpenBiome even joked that “It’s harder to become a donor than it is to get into MIT.” The poop jokes flying around that office have to MINT.
So passing it hard. But if your poop passes the test, you will get $40 a sample, with a $50 bonus if you come in five days a week. If you do the math, that’s $13,000 a year.
Nice work if you can get it.
[H/T UPROXX]