This is the Guardian.

So I'm heading into Central London on the tube carrying what looks very like a kind of

Tupperware style soup container.

That's Guardian Science Correspondent Linda Gedis, talking about a trip she recently took across London.

And then I get out of the tube at Westminster and cross Westminster Bridge, which is very busy actually, and I'm kind of watching my step because again I don't want to trip up and risk

dropping this container on the floor that would be an absolute disaster.

And why would spilling her cargo be so bad? Well,

inside that box is a freshly laid poo. That's all that's a very healthy, a very special, poo of mine. The reason I was carrying my poo across London was that I had

volunteered as a fecal transplant donor. Researchers are exploring the potential of fecal transplants,

inserting poo through the rectum into the colon,

to treat all kinds of gut-related conditions.

But the reason I was at St Thomas's is because they

have been working on a different way of getting the bacteria from healthy donors

into people's guts and that's through capsules or

crapsules as they're known in the trade.

The hope is that these crapsules could one day be prescribed for a whole range of diseases.

But is this something people are ready to swallow?

From the Guardian, I Mad Madeline Finley, and this is Science Weekly.

Linda Gedes, you're a science correspondent for The Guardian and recently you reported on and contributed to the science of fecal transplants, so in a way that we can easily digest, what is a fecal transplant?

A fecal transplant involves taking bacteria or sometimes poo from a healthy person and getting them into the

guts of somebody who is suffering from usually an infection with a bug called Clostridium difficile.

That's the kind of only licensed use at the moment, but fecal transplants are currently being explored in all sorts of clinical trials around the world

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