Picnic spot
he familiar nose-wrinkling smell of dirty dishrags wafted out of the Petri
dish. Faintly yellow-tinged raised colonies dotted the surface of the agar.
"Pseudomonas again," Colin thought. "Can't keep a good bug down."
He put the dish and cover back and took the next candidate from the incubator. There were eleven students in his tutorial group and not one of them seemed to be able to culture what they set out to culture. One plate had the velvety corrugated white swathes of Bacillus subtilis. Most had just managed assorted furry coloured circles of moulds, including the green of Penicillium in most and the little black punctuation marks of Aspergillus niger. Something simple and straightforward like E. coli seemed to be out of the question. He could see them now, waving the carefully sterilised plates around in the air, open, while they discussed last night's party or tomorrow's.
Colin sighed and thought about the afternoon session. He could picture it: the happy good humour and know-it-all remarks about Fleming and discovering penicillin. "Every year, they think they are original," he thought, looking through a mental series of mirror images reaching back to his younger, more enthusiastic days. Nowadays, the hands-on stuff, the art of microbiology, was unreal to them. Not for them the efficient streaking of agar plates, Not for them the joyous flourish of a platinum loop on agar. It was all micro-culture techniques and computerised identification. In any case, they would all go away to their computers, and simulate the experiment successfully in the sterility of virtual cultures and machine-perfect methods.
He looked at the last culture dish and in his disillusionment, nearly missed the anomaly. At first glance, the agar looked untouched; unused. Then he saw it, faintly, as the plate's orientation to the light changed with his slight movement. There was a reflective, iridescent, irregular patch on the plate. Curious, yet uninterested, Colin reached for the old fashioned loupe on the shelf above his bench and took the plate to examine it in a stronger light. Now he could make it out. It was not irregular, it was a word. The word was 'cure'. He closed the plate and sat back on his lab stool with a sigh of irritation.
"Bloody students," he said wryly. He raised his voice.
"Wayne, come and have a look at this."
Wayne Waxman, his technician came into the room, a query on his face.
"Look at this Wayne," said Colin. "Bloody students and their games. Mind you, this one is pretty ingenious. Pity they don't employ it more constructively."
"I'll be buggered," Wayne said with a short bark of a laugh. "Blowed if I know how they could do it though Col."
Colin took another look at the faint inscription. This time he thought about what he was seeing, searching his own mind for a solution to the puzzle. He checked the code number on the dish.
"Fleur Howard."
"Wouldn't have picked her as the joker," Wayne said, "unless someone else is setting her up."
"I don't get this,Wayne." Colin was frowning at the Petri dish. "I don't get this at all."
The two men glanced up at the clock above the lab door. It was morning tea time, and they responded automatically to the 10.30 on the clock by heading towards the staff tearoom.
"Seems a real waste of someone's talent, doesn't it?" Wayne said over his coffee and Tim-Tam.
"Mmm, it does," said Colin, thinking furiously about possibilities. He had never seen anything like it. Oil-water interfaces and other notions churned through his mind.
"I want to figure this out," he said to Wayne. He tipped his coffee down the sink, rinsed his cup and left it to drain. "I have to say, it is pretty intriguing." Colin headed for the door.
Wayne was intrigued too, but he had another five minutes of his tea break to go. Usually five made ten, but today he thought he had better go see what Colin was up to.
Colin was looking at the culture dish again, bemused. "I don't believe this!" he said as Wayne came in. The faint inscription now read 'cure f'.
At Colin's request, Wayne brought in half a dozen unused culture dishes. Wayne watched as Colin, with uncommon care even for him, did a sterile transfer of a tiny scraping from the original plate onto five of the new plates. He put two in the 37 degree incubator where the original had been, two in the 30 degree incubator, and one in the refrigerator. With a sterile blade, he excised a small chunk of agar from the affected part of the original and inverted it onto the sixth dish. This he placed in the 37 degree incubator, along with the original.
Four hours later, on the dot, Colin checked his cultures, starting with the one in the refrigerator. There was nothing. He moved on to the 30 degree cultures. Nothing.
"So far," he thought, "just as I expected, thank God."
He checked out the 37 degree cultures, including the one with the little lump of agar from the original. Nothing.
"Good," he said to himself, suppressing a tiny inner disappointment. He still had no idea how the trick had been done, though. Finally, he went back to the original, to search for inspiration. This time he felt a thrill of apprehension as he viewed the plate. The tiny dents he had made had disappeared and the inscription now read 'cure for rh'. He could almost believe the words were flashing at him like a tiny neon light. He put the culture back in the incubator and glanced at the clock. Almost time for the afternoon's tutorial. He thought quickly, and decided.
The eleven students straggled in and scattered themselves comfortably in Colin's vicinity.
"I checked the plates this morning," he told them, "and none of you actually managed to produce an uncontaminated plate, so I thought today we would discuss sterile technique and try again next session."
Eyes gazed heavenwards and there were assorted groans.
"I know, I know," he said, observing all of them carefully for any untoward reaction, "it doesn't excite you a great deal, but let's face it, macro techniques or micro, the ability to produce pure cultures and to avoid contamination is fundamental. In microbiology, you have to really pay attention to detail."
He looked particularly at Fleur Howard but neither she nor any of the others displayed any sign of disappointment or anxiety about not looking at the cultures.
It turned out that the session was lively and productive. Several of the students were obviously interested enough to have gone into techniques for micro-culture, and displayed an excellent theoretical grasp of technique. For Colin, this sort of thing was uninteresting and lacking in soul. For his students, he realised, it was the present that interested them, not the past. Their world was micro-techniques, micro-computers, micro everything.
With customary patience, Colin waited a further four hours before returning to the cultures. With customary method, he started with the lowest temperature plates. There was nothing on any of the plates. It confirmed his thought that somehow, someone had sprung some elaborate physico-chemical joke on him. The substance was clearly not alive. He went back to the original culture. Wayne Waxman had gone home, so he had no-one to share his thoughts with. His hands shook as he examined the surface.
"I have to find this genius," was his thought. "I want to know how this was done."
The inscription now read 'cure for rhinovirus'. Rhinovirus! The common cold. Well at least the genius had learned some terminology. He noticed that just after the inscription, just like a punctuation mark, was a little black dot.
"Oh well," he thought, "I'm not perfect either. Looks like I've got a little spot of Aspergillus niger in here."
He gathered up all the plates and placed them into the disposal unit for overnight incineration, and went home. He would wait until it all got too much for the perpetrator.
If only Colin's disdain for micro-technique had not been so acute, he might have found his solution. The generous aliens who left the message also left the instructions for the cure. They had been in the little black dot.
Colin lived to age seventy eight, dying of the complications of viral pneumonia in the end. He had been dead for over twenty years when the aliens passed by again on their way home. The aliens were pleased to see that viral disease was no longer a menace on the little blue planet they had picnicked at a while back. They did not notice that the latest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Medicine was Professor Fleur Howard.
Back to the archive 
Return to.... SSC
