A listicle is defined as “a piece of writing or other content presented wholly or partly in the form of a list.”
Listicles as web content are incredibly popular. People love lists and the short listicles also appeal to a society that increasingly likes to get its information in manageable bites. Sad, but true.
As someone who spent a lot of time watching David Letterman and his Top Ten Lists, even before the advent of the internet, I get their appeal.
The immensely popular website Buzzfeed is probably the internet’s champion when it comes to listicles – along with quizzes to determine which house you would like based on your dessert choices. But I digress.
But, once in a while, tucked away in these easy to digest listicles, a few nuggets of gold emerge. And this time it was related to microbiology, a topic near and dear to the pharmaceutical industry. The article which was titled: People Are Sharing The Wildest Historical Events That Are Rarely Talked About, And I'm Gonna Need Documentaries About Several Of These featured stories that are true, but have somehow been relegated to the dustbin of history. Two of the mentions were microbiology-related.
The first mention was a reference to “Angel’s Glow.” Witnessed after the April 1862 Civil War Battle of Shiloh when some injured soldiers reported that their wounds were emitting a greenish-blue color and in fact their wounds were healing faster than those whose wounds were not glowing. It wasn’t until 2001 when high school student William Martin was touring the battle site and decided he wanted to investigate the claims for a project and enlisted the help of a microbiologist - who happned to be his mother Phyllis - a microbiologist for the USDA Agricultural Research Service.
Together they studied the site and found that the “battle site was a breeding ground for a type of nematode that contained a glowing bacteria called Photorhabdus luminescens. While the bacteria normally couldn't live on humans, it was able to survive on the soldiers because they were damp and cold, with some of them even suffering from hypothermia. The bacteria fought off infections and consumed other dangerous pathogens that attempted to enter the wound, which explained the quicker healing times. Martin and his partners earned international recognition for their discovery.”
The second mention is about microbiologist Maurice Hilleman. In 1957 Hilleman accurately predicted that a respiratory virus that originated in East Asia would eventually make its way to the United States. Using his industry influence he convinced the pharma industry to prepare vaccines against what was identified as the H2N2 flu virus. The little-known pandemic of 1957- 1958 resulted in an estimated 1.1 million deaths worldwide. In the United States 116,000 died but without Hilleman’s actions researchers believe an additional 1 million people would have died.
In this issue of American Pharmaceutical Review, we have five articles on a variety of microbiology topics – and not one is in the form of a listicle.
Hopefully, by reading these five articles and the others in this issue you can find your own nuggets of wisdom.
If you do find anything interesting, my advice would be to list them in a Word document – for easy reference later.
Mike Auerbach
Pharma Group Editor-in-Chief
mauerbach@comparenetworks.com Subscribe to our e-Newsletters
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