This was at Bowling Green State University in BG, Ohio. Perhaps he knew
George. I can't remember my profs name, but he was probably in his 50's
when I had him in 1970 (maybe he was younger, but when you're 21,
everyone who's older looks like they're 50 :-)).
I'm sure the S. pneumo thing worked well, but it's just so gross! I
remember in one of our labs we were supposed to inject the mice with
something - possibly the S. pneumo. I remember holding the little mouse
with my fingers. He squeaked when I touched him with the tip of the
needle. That did it for me! I decided then and there I would never
have anything to do with animal research. I put the mouse down, and
left the lab in tears. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. If I had
to fail the lab, so be it. I got an A in the course anyway, but it was
probably because the Kent State thing happened that spring, and after
that, we lost about a week of classes. The curriculum went out the
window and many kids never even attended classes after that. Our campus
closed down for a week after May 4, 1970. It was a very scary time.
Yes, I'm sure those films would be difficult to show now. These were
all government issue movies, and they weren't staged. They were very
realistic and pointed out to me what a miracle antibiotics and vaccines
were, and the definite advantages of having a clean water supply (in the
case of the cholera movie). Perhaps kids today could use a reminder of
this in light of the current anthrax scare.
Judy Dilworth, M.T. (ASCP)
Microbiology
Larry Farrell wrote:
>> Sounds like George Cozad at the University of Oklahoma, my old alma mater,
> but he probably retired before you would have been in school, and I don't
> know where you went to school anyway. Needless to say, that practice of
> maintaining pneumo. wasn't necessarily an idiosyncrasy of only a limited
> Microbiology professors because it worked so very well. Really easy to
> recover hot pneumo. by simply injecting some sterile saline into the
> peritoneal cavity once the mouse had thawed, without the hassle of
> constantly transferring on artificial medium and running the risk of loss of
> the capsule.
