A Chinese biotech company has drawn a lot of attention on social media due to its ad inviting people to donate their excrement in return for 300 yuan ($46.3) per time.
Xbiome, a biopharmaceutical company based in Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong Province, confirmed to the Global Times on Friday that they are recruiting excrement donors.
The company received more than 1,000 applications within a day after the recruitment ad went viral online, said a company staffer. “Now almost all of my colleagues are busy dealing with the applications,” the staffer told the Global Times on Friday.
According to the recruitment ad that was widely spread on Twitter-like Weibo, the company recruits people aged between 18 and 40, and “college students are preferred.” Candidates must have a health check, and only those who pass the check are qualified donors, the ad said.
“A donor can receive 300 yuan each time as a nutritional subsidy, and he/she can donate excrement 22 times at most per month,” read the ad. Qualified candidates can become the company’s long-term donors, getting as much as 6,600 yuan every month, it added.
The company’s recruitment aroused the curiosity of Weibo users, with many joking that this is perhaps the easiest way of making money. “I think I can afford a house in Shenzhen with the help of my stool,” one user wrote.
Xbiome said on its website that it collects the human excrement to research treatment of human diseases using the “hundreds of billions of microbes” in the excrement.
“It is currently the most ideal treatment for transplanting intestinal flora in healthy human feces,” it said. “This method is called fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT).”
Aerial photo taken on Aug. 13, 2020 shows a view of Shenzhen, south China’s Guangdong Province.Photo:Xinhua
