A "shriveled piece of intestine" from an unfortunate, unknown victim of Philadelphia's 1849 outbreak of cholera has given researchers just enough material for them to decode the DNA of the bacteria that struck him down.
So reports Tom Avril of the Philadelphia Inquirer, adding that while the sequencing of this historical, and historic, cholera will be "of no immediate help to doctors who treat the modern form of the disease," it will "offer clues as to how the microbe has tweaked itself to remain a deadly fixture in the human experience."
You might be wondering who would save a piece of intestine for more than 150 years and why.
Avril asks his readers, "Care to guess who had something like that sitting on a shelf?"
It's a fair bet that many of his readers knew exactly where it came from, and Avril knows that. "Right the first time," he writes. "The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia has at least six intestines from cholera victims in 1849."
The what-er museum? The Mütter museum is well known to folks in Philadelphia but probably not so well known anywhere else. You know the scenes in the Frankenstein movies where the torch-bearing laboratory assistant leads the unsuspecting visitors curling down a dark spiral staircase and suddenly you see the laboratory with its bubbling beakers, weird animal remains, and crackling Jacob's ladder? Those scenes could be filmed in the Mütter with few alterations. Last Fall, the Inquirer's Jason Nark wrote about participating in the museum's first sleepover. Nark was pretty sure why he and the others had been invited to the sleepover: One of its staffers has "gone mad, his minions have joined him, and most of us are doomed to become specimens," Nark writes.
But, uh, where was I? Oh, yes–cholera!
Avril does a good job of walking us through the experiment. Researchers "used scalpels to extract six tissue bits the size of postage stamps," then "used a series of chemical and computer techniques to fish out fragments that appeared to be from the 1849 bacteria, matching them as best they could to the framework of a known cholera genome from the mid-20th century."
The cholera killed a patient known only as 3090.13. "One can use the dead to inform the living," an official connected with the museum said ominously. (On that adverb–I don't know whether he said it ominously. But if he didn't, he should have.)
As far as we know, no reporters were harmed during the preparation of these stories. No Inquirer reporter had his organs chopped up, preserved, and bottled at the Mütter.
As far as we know.
-Paul Raeburn
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