Althouse: "Microbiologist Takes Handprint of Her Son After Playing Outside and Incubates the Results."

June 11, 2015

"Microbiologist Takes Handprint of Her Son After Playing Outside and Incubates the Results."

Amazing and beautiful.

And for some reason it reminded me that I wanted to blog "I rediscovered my Jurassic Park dossier when cleaning out a cupboard... "

13 comments:

Skyler said...: The world is a dirty place.; 6/11/15, 4:37 PM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: Cool. Reminds me of an Arcimboldo painting.; 6/11/15, 4:48 PM
Michael K said...: Microbiologist friends doubt that this is valid. We used to touch blood agar plates to see if anyone had staph on their hands but most of this stuff is bogus.; 6/11/15, 4:50 PM
Rob said...: Children are such dirty little buggers. Keep them inside if possible, and if they have to be outside, douse them in alcohol in a decontamination chamber when they return.; 6/11/15, 4:56 PM
kcom said...: Alternatively, recognize that the human race has survived for tens to hundreds of thousands of years with all the same germs out there.; 6/11/15, 5:17 PM
YoungHegelian said...: There's only one thing to be done about this.; 6/11/15, 5:58 PM
CWJ said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 6/11/15, 6:14 PM
CWJ said...: kcom,

I totally agree. In fact I wonder how many of today's "childhood diseases" are due to parents trying to keep their children in an antiseptic bubble.

Note Althouse said "amazing and beautiful" not "hide the children."; 6/11/15, 6:18 PM
Yancey Ward said...: His hands had to have been literally filthy to generate this kind of visual variety of growth. However, the result is quite pretty. Makes you appreciate your immune system and your symbiotic microbes, doesn't it?; 6/11/15, 6:49 PM
paminwi said...: I say stop using those hand sanitizes for kids all the time. A little dirt doesn't hurt unless you have compromised immune system. Kids on farms have been shown to be more resistant to all kinds of things because of all the germs they are exposed to.; 6/11/15, 7:18 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: I went to a three week science camp once, and we swabbed and cultured lots of things. Nothing came out so interestingly.; 6/11/15, 11:52 PM
Jaq said...: There was a news story recently about some "volunteers" who spotted an American Dogwood in a forest in Vermont. They have mostly died out due to a fungus. These "volunteers" then led a camera crew and several reporters to the tree, which had stood in isolation and avoided the blight. All I could think of was that all of these people were probably tracking blight to the tree.

The reason I call them "volunteers" is that what they do is to go on private land searching for any rare species, even if it is not rare in general, but only rare in Vermont, so that they can prevent development on that land.; 6/12/15, 8:10 AM
Jaq said...: I was sure that this post was bait for jimbino.; 6/12/15, 8:11 AM