History’s Hidden Witnesses: The Stories Behind the Stories

the smell was the first thing you learned to ignore a sour earthy tang of old cultures and carbolic acid it wasn't the clean electric that thomas watson described in professor bell's workshop no this was biology it was life and more often death on a microscopic scale and my job in the late summer of nineteen twenty eight was to bring order to it to wash the glass plates sterilize the instruments and clear away the professor's abandoned experiments professor fleming was a brilliant man he was not a tidy one that's the first footnote you need to understand his bench was a chaotic landscape of glass and paper we junior staff had a running joke that some of

the dust in his laboratory at saint mary's was older than we were he'd begin a line of inquiry get distracted by another and leave the first one to fester literally that august he went on holiday leaving a mountain of petri dishes stacked on a side bench they were mostly staphylococcus cultures little golden colonies of bacteria thriving in their gelatin beds my job was simple get them cleaned and sterilized before he returned a tedious thankless task it was my entire world wash sterilize repeat each plate was a ghost of a question he'd already forgotten he'd asked and i was the one who erased the board footnote number two the lab was on the ground floor and the window was almost always left ajar for ventilation he'd say but on a damp london day it let in more than just air it let in the city spores dust the microscopic detritus of a million lives floating past

on the breeze just looking for a place to land he returned on september 3 tanned and rested i was at the bench finally working my way through the last stack of plates from the discard pile he came over humming and picked one from near the top that's a funny thing he said more to himself than to me i glanced over it was just another contaminated plate a bloom of fuzzy blue green mold had taken root the kind you'd find on a forgotten piece of bread an annoyance a failure another plate for me to scrub clean but he didn't put it down he held it up to the light and he pointed look there his voice was quiet not excited just observant around the patch of mold the golden carpet of staphylococcus bacteria was gone not just gone it was dissolved melted away into the agar leaving a perfect clear halo a circle of nothing in a world where my entire purpose

was to cultivate growth it was the absence of it that made him stop suddenly that dirty contaminated plate was the most precious object in the entire hospital it wasn't rubbish to be sterilized it was evidence my job was no longer to clean up the mess it was to preserve it to help him grow more of it he called the mold juice penicillin a name that meant nothing to me then footnote number three the last one for every one plate he happened to notice i will always wonder how many i had already washed away how many times had a little puff of mold landed just so done its silent work and been scrubbed into oblivion by

someone like me just trying to tidy up i spent the rest of my week not cleaning but cultivating tending to a patch of mold on a forgotten glass dish watching a circle of nothing that would in time change absolutely everything