Next week the University of California, San Diego’s prestigious Scripps Institution of Oceanography is the location for an intriguing academic conference. It’s devoted to the microorganisms that exist on and within all of us. But participation by a much larger type of organism will be significantly restricted.

The microbiome describes the community of tiny living things that exist on a human body, for example, while the metabolome describes chemicals found in a particular biological sample, such as blood. The UC San Diego...