"Understanding Bacteria" "Breaking news from WTOP." "We haven't ruled out or ruled in anything." "We're waiting for the test results." "We go straight to downtown Washington, the scene of the..." "A note said the anonymous package contained deadly bacteria, anthrax." "Toxic material teams were called out." "People who'd handled the package were decontaminated and rushed to hospitals." "This is what they were worried about." "Saddam Hussein spent as much as one hundred million dollars developing Iraq's biological weapons." "By the time Iraq invaded Kuwait," "Hussein had cultures of anthrax and enough poison from the bacterium that causes botulism to kill every person on the planet." "During the Persian Gulf War part of the supply had been deployed in missiles, and Iraqi commanders had authorization to fire." "Then the war was over." "The United Nations destroyed the facilities where the toxin was made." "Even without the germs of war, people are spooked by the diseases caused by bacteria:" "Pneumonia, Salmonella, meningitis... all caused by bacteria and passed among us every day." "Infectious diseases are the greatest cause of illness and death in human history." "It is now the third highest cause of death in the United States." "Bacteria can make us deathly sick and often kill us." "And just when we develop medicines to kill the germs, they do what they do best... mutate, to resist our medicines." "Supermarket shoppers are bombarded with products to kill germs." "In the past three years, the number of new antibacterial products has tripled." "I've become more concerned about getting sick from the Salmonella." "Kills germs that cause food-borne illnesses." "Germs." "Ah, you know I have a six month old baby and so that's a major concern for me." "That's what I worry about mostly is the germs and all those things they talk about in the kitchen." "How about dreaming up something about soap and water for Homer for tomorrow morning?" "Soap and water, hey?" "And for decades, the evils of bacteria have been drummed into our heads." "How about..." "Oh, you smell sweet..." "Yes, sweeter than you used to be." "Sweeter than you used to be." "Sweeter than you used to be." "You'll be neat..." "Yes neater than you used to be when you get rid of BO." "It's not sissy to be clean." "Who said that?" "Who's there?" "Let me introduce myself." "Soapy's the name, partner." "Why, you're a living cake of soap?" "Big as life, Billy." "We are destined to always live with microorganisms and the concept that we will eradicate microorganisms." "You can wash to your heart's content, but you won't rid your skin of microorganisms." "Ah, and you can scrub to your heart's content and you won't rid, rid your mouth of bacteria." "And there are other things that we know about that bacteria are, are, are constantly present." "Our intestinal tract is one great fermentation tube and, ah, it's constantly gurgling and grinding and converting things." "We, we absolutely depend on these things and there's no way out of it." "Actually, less than one percent of all bacteria cause disease." "The others perform countless useful uctions in everyday lives." "Bacteria are behind many of our favorite foods, and when those foods spill down the front of us, bacterial enzymes help get the stains out." "Even manmade snow relies on bacteria." "Protein from freeze dried bacteria helps flakes to form out of water mist." "Bacteria are the oldest life form on Earth." "They survive, even thrive, in some of the harshest environments in the hot springs of Yellowstone, in pools of acid, in caves, in crevices in the Earth without light or air." "Next to ocean vents where the water temperature is four hundred and eighty degrees." "Bacteria have more surprises than any organisms because they're so diverse." "They have so many different functions." "They carry out all of the major functions in the world." "They supply us with our nitrogen." "They supply most of the carbon to the biosphere." "They cycle nutrients." "They, they produce antibiotics." "They keep us healthy." "They make us sick." "They basically control every major function in biology, and they probably do all sorts of things that we don't know about yet because we haven't discovered them all." "This is what a bacterium is." "A single cell organism with its own branch on the tree of life." "Daisies, squirrels and people on this side because their bodies are made up of many cells." "It's the smallest of free living organisms." "About a million would fit on the head of a pin." "Viruses are a hundred times smaller, but they have to move into a host cell to survive." "Bacteria come in a variety of shapes and sizes and to reproduce, they simply divide." "In many species, cell division occurs every twenty minutes." "Bacteria have studied us more closely and more lovingly than any other creature." "Ah, even your dog can't give you the devotion that your bacteria do." "They've, ah, explored and, and, ah, understood and, and taken advantage of every nook and cranny of the body to which they can gain access." "We are born bacteria free." "But within hours, we begin to be colonized with about four hundred species of microbes:" "On our skin, in our intestines, in our mouths, noses and throats." "There are more bacteria in our mouths than living people on the planet." "More bacteria in our bodies than human cells." "Billions are helping to digest our last meal." "Those bacteria, E. Coli, turn our food into sugars and processed vitamins." "They also keep us healthy by occupying spaces that otherwise might be occupied by disease-causing bacteria" "But even good bacteria like E. Coli can develop deadly strains." "Bacteria are good or bad, and sometimes they are both." "Remember Saddam Hussein's biological arsenal." "He raised bacteria with the graceful name of" "Clostridia botulina." "It causes botulism, a kind of food poisoning we got to know too well before processing methods were improved." "When we eat it, we get deathly ill." "And we die." "It's a very, it's about, it's, it's as potent a poison as, as is known actually." "Pound for pound, it will kill more things than anything else." "Six million times more deadly than rattlesnake venom, it is the most toxic substance on Earth." "Botulinum toxin could be such a powerful weapon that it's been drafted for war since the '40s." "Why don't you flame this here?" "Scientists suspected there might be a use for the toxin." "Ed Shantz began his study of the toxin while working for Army intelligence during World War II." "Until his retirement, he supplied all the botulinum toxin used in scientific and medical research in the nation." "Eric Johnson has worked with him for the past thirteen years." "We purify it by several purification steps and there is I would say fifty milligrams of toxin in this vial here which is maybe a million lethal doses." "So obviously, we're very careful with how we handle it." "You want a sample?" "After all his years of research," "Dr. Shantz had the imagination to see another application for the toxin." "At first, it started with a small bit of pain at the base of the neck, and then eventually as I'd be driving a car, all of a sudden, my head would go to the left and" "the only way I could get it back was to take my hand and push it back." "Howard Thill suffers from spasmodic torticollis, a painful disorder caused by hyperactive muscles that twist the neck and can permanently tilt a person's head to the front, back or side." "About a hundred and fifty thousand Americans suffer from this condition." "Dr. Shantz wondered if the toxin paralyzes muscles, perhaps a tiny amount would relax overactive muscles." "Ah, there you go." "Oh, boy." "At one one-thousandth, the lethal dose, the deadly toxin becomes a healer." "One left." "And the minute I got my first injections, the pain was gone." "I mean it was just, ah, it was a great, great feeling." "My life had been given back to me." "It's ironic when you take a, ah, toxin that can kill people and all of a sudden, it's saving lives." "It's ironic, and it's, it's a great thing." "Clostridia botulina are strange organisms." "Under the right conditions, they grow quickly into large populations." "Then the cells destroy themselves, the bacteria die and the deadly toxin is released." "To start a batch of toxin and complete it for medical use, it takes about three weeks." "And, in that time, we can prepare enough toxin to supply the medical profession for many, many years." "And all of it in a tiny tube as you see on the bench." "There is promising research that botulinum toxin will help millions of people suffering from conditions associated with hyperactive muscles such as Parkinson's Disease, Cerebral Palsy," "Multiple Sclerosis and stuttering." "In the meantime, botulinum toxin has become very popular among plastic surgeons like Rhoda Narins." "She uses tiny doses of toxin to remove the traces of worry and squinting without a scalpel." "It doesn't hurt much but it isn't cheap." "A single treatment costs over five hundred dollars." "I want you to see where you're from." "Frown for a minute?" "O.K. Relax." "Relax." "Do it again." "You're on the lot." "Relax." "San Francisco is proud of her bread." "Distinctly sour with a golden crust." "Legend has it that miners ran off to look for gold forgetting all about the half made/ read dough they'd started." "Later they discovered it tasted very different from other batches ...sour." "They didn't know it but bacteria would become the flavor of the town." "Sour dough bread is made from a special sour dough starter." "At Boudin, the same starter or mother dough, has been used every day since 1849." "Willie Josif has been a baker at Boudin for thirty-three years." "We put flour, water, ah, mother dough and we mix for ten minutes." "That's a normal ah, fermented dough It's normal with flour in the water and the mother dough, ah, is here fresh every day." "Ah, from a piece of dough you, you duplicate it for tomorrow." "And that's makes the bread sour." "If you don't have the mother dough, you don't get no sour." "No one knew what exactly gave sour dough bread its flavor until 1970, when researchers from the United States Department of" "Agriculture uncovered the secret of the sour." "A unique strain of Lactobacilli bacteria." "They named it, as you might expect, / actobacillus San Francisco." "For so many years, people produced this product." "Really not understanding what was going on." "Now scientifically we understand what is actually happening to produce that loaf of bread." "The art is now melded with the science." "The steam out of the oven comes and, and all that flavor." "All that smell, you know." "People get all... hmm... so good." "It's everything." "Mother dough, San Francisco, the fog, the bacteria, ah, the climate." "A glass of milk... a slice of cheese with your bread?" "Call on bacteria." "If this is a machine for turning grass into milk, its gears are bacteria." "Trillions of bacteria are at work in the first to four stomachs in a cow." "As they do in us, bacteria convert feed into nutrients which eventually become milk." "When the milk is used to make cheese, bacteria play starring roles." "Specific bacteria provide the different flavors of cheese and put the holes in Swiss Cheese." "We put it into a warm room, add about, ah, seventy to seventy-four degrees at which point the propiona bacteria perform gas and the gas accumulates and we have eyes." "It sounds pretty good." "A little solid over here." "There we go Smell that." "Nice eyes." "Primo." "And then there are the bad bugs." "You've probably heard of necrotizing fasciitis." "Maybe you know it better as this, flesh eating bacteria." "The villain is a group A, Streptococcus, the bacterium behind strep throat." "It's commonly found on skin and in throats and usually doesn't cause problems." "But another strain can kill with frightening speed." "Eleven people died in England in 1994 from a type that destroys human tissue at a rate of an inch an hour." "Outbreaks of the disease swept through the headlines and popular culture." "Please tell us it's nothing." "Ah, he has necrotizing fasciitis from the alligator bite." "Oh, my God." "Wh... wh... what is this..." "Oh, my God?" "What is this... oh, my God, fasciitis?" "Is this what I think it is?" "Is this, is this the dead flesh eating bacteria?" "Yes." "Oh my God." "It infects fifteen hundred people a year." "It may be comforting to note that more people are hit by trains than by this bacterium... or maybe not." "Now is not the time to panic." "We have a lethal strain of Streptococcus from an unknown origin." "Three patients are dead." "The Health Marshall's in my office." "When would be a good time to panic?" "These are invasive diseases." "Infections that occur when strep enters the bloodstream, lungs or muscles." "It's the kind of thing that suddenly killed Jim Henson, the creator of The Muppets in 1990." "Who gets these deadly strains of group A strep and why remains a mystery?" "Today, doctors at Children's Hospital stated that one of the children allegedly poisoned by Jack in the" "Box Hamburgers died this morning from complications." "Ah, his heart could no longer support his blood pressure." "Researchers know more about the disease caused by E. Coli." "In 1993, four children died and more than seven hundred people were sickened in the Pacific Northwest after eating undercooked hamburgers from a fast food chain." "The cause:" "A bad cousin of the harmless bacteria living in our intestines." "According to state health officials, there are over one hundred cases of E. Coli poisoning connected with this case in Western Washington alone." "And there could be more." "This bad E. Coli lives in the intestines of cows." "It gets in ground beef if the parts of the cow are not properly cleaned and separated during meat processing." "Adequate cooking, however, will kill the organism." "Only a small percentage of bacteria may cause disease, but these pathogens have caused untold human misery." "Tuberculosis has claimed at least five hundred million lives." "It is the biggest all time killer from a single pathogen." "Hello." "Hello, TB." "Why, hello there, Professor." "Well, well." "There you are." "Tell us about yourself." "Sure." "I love to talk about myself." "Bacterial diseases have a long and brutal history." "One of the most devastating was Black Death or Bubonic Plague." "The disease, transmitted by fleas, marched across Europe and Asia in the 14th century and killed a third of the population." "The death rate from Bubonic Plague was ninety percent." "With no medicines to fight the bacteria, doctors could do nothing to cure infectious diseases." "The battle continued until the 20th century when an accidental discovery changed the course of medical history." "On the return trip, the planes bring wounded back to the hospitals in Britain." "Gangrene, from which millions have perished in past wars, has been conquered by the miracle of penicillin." "Scientists are manufacturing..." "The miracle began in 1928 when a British scientist named Alexander Fleming went on vacation." "He didn't bother to clean up first, just placed his bacterial cultures in the sink." "When he returned, he noticed one dish had gotten moldy." "The mold killed the bacteria but Fleming couldn't stabilize or purify it." "That took a four-man team from Oxford and ten years." "They named the drug after the mold:" "Penicillium led to penicillin." "Thousands of men, thanks to penicillin and plasma, will come home to their thankful families." "The whole world of peace to come will reap the benefits of this great wartime medical discovery." "Science has..." "Penicillin was the dawn of a new age in medicine." "At last, doctors had the power to heal." "It seemed man had infectious disease on the run." "It was in the '40s, ah, when antibiotics really came into general use." "There was, there was such a, a kind of high that developed because we were taking things like, like Streptococcal blood poisoning and pneumonias, gonorrhea, syphilis and all of these things were being/ ured." "We really, it was a miracle." "Four year old Elijah was a sick little boy, and his mother, Vivian, was worried." "He wouldn't eat." "He wouldn't play." "He wouldn't do anything." "He just lay there." "And he say his foot was hurting." "I asked him did he step on something or did he hurt his foot?" "And he said, "No."" "It was very unusual." "I mean after his fever wouldn't go down, I knew it was serious." "As an experienced mother of Five, Vivian had never seen an illness like this." "After two days of high fever, she brought Elijah to the hospital." "And I didn't know what happened and there wasn't any cuts or bruises." "There wasn't any, ah, sign of something that happened to him." "And, ah, I was confused." "I didn't know what it was." "I had no idea." "Does it hurt when I go like that?" "Does it hurt when I go like that?" "Vivian learned Elijah's fever and pain were caused by a bacterial infection in his foot." "The bacterium called pneumococcus usually causes ear infections." "But in Elijah's case, it got in his bloodstream and lodged in the bone." "The doctors prescribed antibiotics and expected Elijah to feel better in a couple of days." "But Five days later, Elijah's fever had not gone down." "The antibiotics were not working." "In the late '70s, we produced in the pharmaceutical industry, ah antibiotics active against resistant organisms in three or four different classes." "In the early '80s, these products all came to the market and everybody, all physicians, said, "Well now we've got something active against all the resistant organisms."" "And the message that came back to/ he pharmaceutical industry from the medical community was, in fact, that they really didn't need anymore, ah, new antibiotics." "I think that that was a certain segment of the medical community who didn't understand bacteria, and understand how bacteria change and modify and adapt." "This is one way bacteria adapt." "A bacterium with a plasmid..." "plasmids hold genetic information... will connect with other bacterium." "A copy of the DN A is transferred." "The new DN A may dictate a new food or energy source or tell how to dodge an antibiotic." "This sharing is passed on and on to other bacteria, even among different species." "And it can happen in less than an hour." "You could say that well if organisms really begin to exchange information, then all bacteria would kind of be, be the same." "They'd be an amalgam." "But they're not." "Each one is kind of very individualistic, ah, in terms of what they do and how they survive." "And each one has a gimmick in order to survive so that it has its place as it were, in the world." "That's little comfort for Elijah and his mother as the doctors try to fiind out why he is not getting better." "The heavy weapons of medicine are brought out to pinpoint his bone infection." "Doctors collect bacteria from his foot in the operating room, then grow it in the laboratory to fiind out why the medicine isn't working." "You'll see more when you get the in-hole feeds." "It looks like we're on the right track." "Pneumococcus is the leading bacterial cause of pneumonia, ear infections and meningitis." "Throughout the country, the number of resistant pneumococcus strains is rising and the strains are resisting more classes of antibiotics." "Antibiotic resistance means that the bacteria have developed a way to avoid the killing action of antibiotics." "Which simply means that if you have an infection, and you're given one of these antibiotics, it probably won't work for you." "Thank you." "One way to study antibiotic resistance is to go where antibiotic use is highest." "In Wisconsin, nurses Priscilla Goltz and Jane Stofflit are collecting samples of, well, the material produced by runny noses." "It's part of a study for The Centers for Disease Control." "The rate of resistant pneumococcus in some Wisconsin daycare settings is over forty percent." "O.K. Now, I'm going to give you a bear hug and you give" "Tom a bear hug." "O. K?" "Jane is just going to give you a hug and we're just going to check your nose, honey." "O. K?" "What I want you is just count to three, honey." "O. K?" "One... two... three." "Good girl." "You did good, honey." "Thank you." "Now you got to pick out a toy." "Let's go pick out a toy." "The nurses will return in a year and retest the children to monitor the trend." "Daycare centers are often seen as one of the wonderful breeding grounds of new and novel resistant organisms." "In many large daycare centers, there may be as many as thirty or forty percent of children on an antibiotic at any given time." "And so that, ah, an organism, ah, that is a good colonizer has a tremendous opportunity in a daycare center, ah, to colonize lots of children, ah, and eventually it'll cause disease." "Particularly, ah, if it's resistant to one or two or three antibiotics." "Millions of children take antibiotics for ear infections or to prevent them." "If the medicine doesn't kill all the bacteria, the infection returns and more antibiotics are prescribed." "Doctors are concerned about the overuse of drugs but don't see many alternatives." "Really easy for him to take and he, his temperament is just so much better." "He's happier." "Cause one of the things I want to do today besides go through a well child checkup is fiind out what we need to do for him in terms of his repeated ear infections." "Right." "O.K. Great." "So, we'll, we'll talk about that in a couple of minutes." "You know we've talked about the bacteria called the pneumococcus bacteria." "Right." "It's probably the most common bacterial cause of ear infections." "And that's the one that's showing more signs of not responding well to antibiotics." "Oh, O.K. Hi." "Hi." "Look at you." "Look at your ears." "He still has a lot of fluid." "It's going to take a while for the fluid that's behind the drum to resorb or go away." "Right." "So with the way his eardrums are looking, I think we ought to put him on a preventive antibiotic..." "O.K." "...and we'll just do that for at least four to six weeks." "When they're real uncomfortable and obviously bothered" "I think it's hard to just let that go." "Especially from a parent." "And if he does develop a rash..." "Antibiotics are also widely prescribed even when they won't help." "Eighteen million prescriptions are written each year for colds which are caused by viruses." "Very good." "The sheer tonnage of antibiotics that is used in the world every year," "I think, contributes to the problem of resistant bacteria in the community which then becomes a problem in the hospital which then becomes a problem in extended care facilities and they're all inextricably linked." "During the 1950s, animals started getting antibiotics, too." "The drugs not only curb disease but for reasons still not understood, they promoted growth." "Today half of all antibiotics used in the United States are used in animal feed." "This little piggy will be fed penicillin and tetracycline before it goes to market." "Even if you're a vegetarian, you get a dose." "Antibiotics are also sprayed on fruits and vegetables." "I can't think of a microbiologist that would say that the wide application of antibiotics will do anything but select for antibiotic resistant organisms." "And so that's a consequence." "Ah, if there are economic reasons for doing it, that may be what the public wants." "But they also have to pay the consequences which will be that those antibiotics may not be useful in the treatment of diseases, ah, at some time in, in the fairly near future." "The, ah, lab has reported back to us on the second sample." "Ah, it showed to be very resistant to the antibiotic he was on." "Not only is it resistant to that antibiotic, it, and actually happens to be resistant to two of the other antibiotics we might use." "Fortunately, though, we've got one left." "Ah, it's an antibiotic called vancomycin." "Are you ready for this?" "Vancomycin is considered the antibiotic of last resort." "It is very potent." "It's expensive and it can be toxic." "Elijah has to be given this medicine intravenously, and he will need to keep the IV in for five weeks, even after he goes home." "A drastic change from pneumococcal infections of the past when a teaspoon of pink medicine twice a day did the trick." "There is a, a feeling of deep concern about, ah, the availability of antibiotics to treat some of the resistant organisms." "For some of the, these major problems, there really is right now only one antibiotic that works." "So, there's a fear that if the resistance would develop to that particular antibiotic, then we would have a major problem on our hands." "Staphylococcus aureus is the number one cause of hospital infections." "In recent years, the increasing number of resistant strains has caused alarm." "Among the staph aureus strains in hospitals, many of them are resistant to everything except vancomycin." "And so if vancomycin resistance moved into these strains, we could have untreatable strains of a very common resistant organism." "That's a, that's a fear." "Our hospital wards in the 1990's would look like the hospital wards in the 1930's which was the pre-antibiotic era." "There we had people dying of diseases such as, ah, Typhoid and Tuberculosis and, and Diphtheria and, ah, pneumonia." "Ah, and we really didn't have much to give them in the way of therapy." "The sun shines in Colorado almost every day in the year." "It has happened." "A patient in a Tokyo hospital developed a vancomycin resistant staph infection." "If the strain travels to the United States as resistance strains have in the past, doctors will have very few options." "One of the factors that has led to a global increase in resistance among bacteria is the fact that we have very mobile populations of people." "You have international travel where you can literally take a resistant organism and transport it from one continent to the other in less than a day." "So it's, it's a major problem around the world." "Some resistant strains of disease are untreatable and potentially deadly." "In 1994, a Korean woman flew from Baltimore to Chicago to Honolulu." "Unknown to her, she had an active case of multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis." "After the woman died from the disease a month later, the passengers on the flights with her were tested." "Fifteen tested positive for TB." "These people may or may not develop active Tuberculosis." "If we've learned anything from the last fifty years of the antibiotic era, it's going, this race is going to continue." "It may accelerate because we'll have new, ah, antibiotics as well as new classes of antibiotics in the future." "But I think we'd be naive to think that just because we have a new class of antibiotics that's active against a currently resistant microorganism that this process is going to stop." "I don't believe that it will." "With the vancomycin we need to worry about things like the renal toxicity and the ototoxicity and that's the, the real problem with the organisms that cause resistance." "So we have a long haul ahead of us." "He's going to be going home on IV antibiotics." "Professionally, we have very few options to offer him." "You didn't stop to say Hi, did you?" "Yeah." "Elijah is ready to go home." "A nurse will visit him there to set up his IV." "He will be monitored carefully to make sure the antibiotic is not damaging his kidneys." "Six weeks later, Elijah's infection is fiinally gone." "This part of South Dakota and and the city of Lead is mining territory." "People from all over the Black Hills have worked for the Homestake Mining Company, the longest continuously running gold mine in the world." "It's a one-company town." "Without Homestake, there would be no Lead." "A lot of the miners are like third and fourth generation." "Ah their grandparents worked in the mine, and then their parents and so, it's like a big family." "It takes six tons of rock to produce just one ounce of gold." "Miners work six days a week, digging, crushing and grinding the ore to unlock the gold." "If you grain this land off you're going to release the gold." "Ah, it's not in the grain boundaries or anything like that." "It's actually free gold." "If you look at this table here, it's nothing more than an automated gold pan." "Doing the same thing the old timersdid in the stre except it's much more efficient and it's doing a lot faster and a lot more material." "See that little golden streak coming down the table." "That's the gold." "But that streak is only half the gold in this ore." "To extract the rest, the rubble goes to giant tanks of cyanide." "Cyanide dissolves gold just like sugar is, dissolves in water." "Ah, it makes a pure solution out of it." "After the gold was extracted, the cyanide solution was dumped into the town's White Wood Creek, killing everything in the water." "For over a hundred years, the creek ran black." "The Environmental Protection Agency gave Homestake one year to develop a plan to get the cyanide out of the creek." "The mine managers weren't sure how to tackle the problem and keep the mine profitable." "For the people in Lead, South Dakota, profits for Homestake meant jobs for the town." "There's very few things besides cyanide that will dissolve gold, and they're a lot nastier than cyanide." "Homestake's Chief executive Officer added a challenge." "Make the stream pure enough for trout." "Homestake hired a local biochemist, Jim Whitlock." "And the problem was not money." "They were willing to spend whatever it took, but the problem was there was no available technology to do this." "There wasn't anything that they could take off the shelf." "The fate of the mine, ah, every, everything was riding on it." "Whitlock and his team decided to use their background in microbiology to try something new." "We started with, with a simple knowledge that bacteria can tolerate cyanide and we knew that some bacteria could tolerate a lot more cyanide than others." "In fact, this was a, a standard means for microbiologists to identify bacteria based on how much cyanide they could tolerate." "And so we looked into that in depth and what we found out is that they actually broke the cyanide molecule into two parts and so that they could actually use it as a food source." "Had a lot of apprehension for a long time." "Ah, we had to convince our Board of Directors that this new process, this all new way of doing things, would work." "And we had to ask them for ten million dollars." "This was the only thing, ah, that we found that had any potential to work." "So it was a one shot deal and it had to work." "That was a little bit on the scary part." "It worked." "Today, all the water from the underground mine is fiiltered through these tanks, each containing about twenty thousand pounds of Pseudomonas bacteria attached to plastic disks." "Now the bacteria like to attach to things and they have a little tail that they use to propel themselves around in the water." "They'll discard the tail and secrete a slime layer which is how they attach to the plastic disk." "So as the disk rotates very slowly about one and a half revolutions per minute, ah, partially submerged in the water tank, the bacteria are attached to the disk." "So, they're in the water and then they're back in the air and then they're in the water." "So when they're in the air, this helps satisfy their oxygen requirement, and when they're in the water then, ah, they're actually, ah, picking up cyanide and absorbing metals." "Every day four million gallons of clean water pours out of the treatment plant and into the White Wood Creek." "Once the plant went on-line in 1984, within six months, there were fish moving into the stream." "Fish, of course, are the best chemists of all." "You, you can't fool them." "It's either O.K. For them or it isn't." "Meet the canaries of the Homestake Gold Mine." "Before the water goes through the pipe and into the creek, trout kept at the treatment plant give the fiinal approval." "The fish were happy." "The Pseudomonas had plenty to eat as they broke down the cyanide for food." "The bookkeepers were happy too." "As we were, ah, looking at a pro, chemical process that would probably have costs us three to four million dollars a year for chemicals and, and operation." "And we ended up with a biological process that costs us approximately half a million dollars a year to operate." "Today the ore blasted out of the earth provides work for a thousand local residents and uncounted trillions of bacteria." "The result is a thousand bars of gold a year." "For me to come back home where I grew up and be part of a team that, that cleaned up an area and completely changed an area, ah, it was very rewarding, particularly because it was at home." "Come back and have a breath test today and see whether or not your antibiotics have worked." "One in ten adults has ulcer disease, and it's not stress related." "Now we know the true cause:" "Helicobacter pylori, a spiral shaped slow acting bacterium that thrives in the stomach." "Simple tests will detect H-pylori and antibiotic treatment can begin." "Very good." "We have a our first sample." "I think it's an, an incredible discovery." "I mean that we've, we've actually been able to come so far in, in where we are with ulcer disease." "Because for so long it was thought that you needed to get rid of the acid." "So the surgery was taking out the acid, ah, part of the stomach making it so that the acid decreased, and also taking out that area where the ulcer is formed primarily." "But now we know that it's just a bacterial disease and all you have to do is just a seven day or ten day course of antibiotics and it's over." "It's great." "Occasionally the first course of antibiotics does not cure a patient." "Then an endoscopy is done." "A tissue sample will be taken to rule out other causes or confirm that H-pylori is present." "My dad, ah, had ulcer disease all of his life and, and really it wasn't until probably about five years ago that he was tested for Helicobacter pylori and said he never felt better in his life," "just because he got treated and he was cured." "I am putting into the small intestine." "This is the first portion." "Helicobacter pylori has affected more than just ulcer disease." "Now scientists are studying the link between bacteria and many chronic illnesses like asthma, periodontal disease, hardening of the arteries," "Crohn's Disease, colitis, rheumatoid arthritis and even some cancers." "If even one of these diseases proves to be caused by bacteria, ah and thus goes from the incurable or, ah, where the cure is a very radical and, and unacceptable to many patients." "Take it off that list and put it on the list of diseases that can be readily cured by antibiotics." "Ah, that would be a major contribution." "This is the Institute for Genomic Research or TIGR." "Here they pull out a bacterium's genetic blueprint, its DN A and break it into chunks that a super computer pieces together." "If the whole DN A is the book describing a bacterium, the genes are the pages." "The computers put the pages in the right order." "I mean what we actually see is a couple million letters of A," "C, G's and T's." "I mean that's the genetic code." "That's what we determine when we actually determine the sequence of the genome is, is the order of the, ah, of the letters." "The real task is in interpreting what that means." "You know what, what words, what sentences, what messages are there and it's, we're fiinding some phenomenal, ah, messages hidden in there." "The things that are preprogrammed into these genomes is, ah, I mean, it, it's, it's absolutely amazing." "And each one of these genomes that we do, it increases our ignorance quotient quite substantially." "Once the genetic blueprints of microorganisms are completed, the functions of the genes are studied." "As researchers understand which genes are responsible for growth or disease, they can be manipulated for many purposes." "And it's given us insight into a much larger question." "We, we, we like to think that we're highly evolved, and therefore our chromosomes are probably highly evolved." "Ah, and bacteria are primitive." "Well, in fact, the opposite is true." "The bacterial chromosomes are very highly evolved." "Ah, if you think of organisms that replicate every twenty minutes to an hour and they've been doing that for billions of years, they've gotten very efficient at everything they do." "So there's, there's no wasted letters in their alphabet." "Essentially they're wall to wall genes for all practical purposes." "Understanding the genes of microorganisms also opens up thousands of new targets for antibiotics, vaccines and industrial applications." "It's amazing the diversity that's out there." "We, we know a tiny fraction of one percent of what's out there, and the smartest thing we could do in this research is, you know, go try and fiind new ways to culture thousands and thousands of new microorganisms" "and fiind out their genetic code and fiind out what's there." "It's going to revolutionize, ah, virtually everything we do." "Yellowstone National Park is one of the richest places on Earth for all microbial life." "Bacteria thrive in the extreme conditions found in the pools." "Tourists see the spectacular scenery." "Researchers come to understand how life can survive." "Many of the organisms that live in this, in these pools, ah, have to eat." "So those are called heterotrophs." "So they have to consume things in their environment." "And in order for a microbe to consume something in its environment, it has to make an enzyme that can break that particular item down." "Well if we see a piece of wood in, in this hot pool and we pull it out and we see that the outside of that piece of wood is bleached white, you automatically ask the question..." "how did that happen?" "So when we look at the microbes associated with that wood, studies have shown that these microbes have that capacity because we've cloned the genes from these organisms that encode those particular enzymes." "And have found that, in fact, they are adapted to breaking down these wood fibers under these extreme conditions." "By cloning the genes that produce whitening enzymes, they can turn it out in quantity." "That means paper companies can use bacterial enzymes to whiten paper and lessen the need for chlorine." "It's good for the environment, and it's big business." "Enzyme production is an eleven and a half billion dollar a year industry." "Most antibiotics come from bacteria living in the soil." "As the search for new antibiotics continues, scientists are learning just how little we know about the microbial life beneath our feet." "To microbiologists the Earth is the richest source of, of new biology that there is." "Because there's far more that we haven't studied than that we have already discovered." "In a teaspoonful of soil there are at least a billion bacteria that we can grow in culture." "But there are many, many more bacteria, perhaps a hundred times as many, that can't grow on our culture media." "And, in fact, we've probably been studying only a tiny portion of the organisms that actually live in soil based on their ability to grow on our Petri plates." "But if the bacteria won't grow in the lab, how do you fiind out what they can do?" "How do you test them?" "Start with the soil." "One of the things we've been doing is extracting the genes from the bacteria directly without culturing them first, just pulling their DN A out directly from the soil and then sequencing pieces of that DNA to describe the organisms that are in that soil." "And using that methodology, we find that most of the organisms in the soil have not yet been described." "The search for new microbial life has taken researchers from backyard soil to the ocean floor to the heavens." "A meteorite from Mars has fossilized structures that looks suspiciously like small bacteria." "Scientists are coming to the conclusion that life may be far more common in the universe than we had supposed." "Anywhere that there is liquid water, there is a possibility of life and we know that here on Earth that's just a fundamental requirement." "And, in fact, anywhere on Earth where there is liquid water, you find there is life." "And so the fact that on planets such as on Mars where you might have hydrothermal features under some of the, ah, ice floes, ah, that might make liquid water is very exciting." "The experts say this is the beginning of the golden age of microbiology." "Industry, medicine, the defimition of life itself are all being changed by single celled creatures you and I can't even see." "Everyone should look at pond water at least a few times a year, if you're a microbiologist." "Because now that the days of technology and, and DN A and, ah, and high-tech things, it is nice to go look in a microscope every once in a while and look at that life and that diversity of life." "Because you can't just put it in a vacuum or, or, look at it as a bunch of, ah, of A's, T's, G's, and C's and a chromosome." "This is, this is, this is not life in itself." "So you should go look at pond water." "Everyone should look at pond water, and, and they will, they'll understand in that instant there's more about, ah, a feeling about what life is than, ah, than almost any other kind of experience they could have." "Hi, there." "Welcome to our happy home." "Good to meet you." "Stacy shook your hands." "Right." "And look at this all over your hands." "Ah!" "Oh, my God!" "This is, it shows how germs are transmitted from hand to hand, person to person and from surfaces." "O.K. Reach for the bottle now." "This is the same bottle I'm going to be using for months in the kitchen." "Right." "I'm putting this on my Italian bread tomorrow, making just tasting." "Now there's the same bottle." "Cross-contaminated." "We now rub it." "Oh, yes." "We got to rub a little bit of this on." "And I reach up." "You want a little salt on that?" "Oh, that would be cool." "I thought cross-contamination was a good thing." "Then I remembered it was cross-pollination." "Cross-pollination is what you're talking about, Fran." "Where's my whistle." "Hello." "That was good." "This is bad." "I couldn't handle that lineup better, Fran." "Would you stick around the rest of the afternoon like" "I have to be." "I got a..."