At 1:15 p.m. on Monday, August 8th, 1904, a British physician named M. H. Gordon took some soil he had 'richly impregnated with a living emulsion' of the virulent bacterium,1 Serratia marcescens, and sprinkled it near a lamp post in front of the U.K. House of Commons. Gordon knew that was the exact spot Members of Parliament had to cross before their 2 p.m. session. His hope was for the politicians to step on the contaminated ground and spread the bacteria inside the Debating Chamber. Gordon wasn't executing a terrorist attack. Rather, he had been appointed by a committee to study how germs spread inside the House of Commons following an outbreak of influenza among its members. Gordon had chosen Serratia marcescens because the bacterium forms easily recognizable red colonies. For his experiment, he placed numerous open Petri dishes inside the Debating Chamber on which the colonies could grow. Gordon's idea was simple: politicians' boots would carry contaminated soil and spread...
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