Mark Smith is a PhD candidate in MIT's Microbiology Graduate Program and helps run the OpenBiome project at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.  The OpenBiome project screens donations for a variety of disease agents and then provides these samples to hospitals around the US for treatment of clostridium difficile infection, which affects approximately 500,000 people in the US and kills about 14,000 annually. The samples are used in fecal microbiotal transplants (fecal transplants) and work as extremely efficient treatment for c. difficile infections.