THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 14, 1995 TAG: 9510130030
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
We've all heard about the threat to humans posed by that vicious little microbe, E. coli.
Well, that danger got some sharp new emphasis in an article that appeared in USA Today not long ago. The alarm was being sounded by a doctor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She grimly cited the urgency of cooking meat thoroughly, of careful commercial and kitchen processing of anything people are going to eat, and of rigorous hand-washing practices in any place where food is touched.
It seems that 16 outbreaks of E. coli poisoning had been reported to the CDC up to that point in the current year, with upward of 100 individuals sickened by the bacteria, which uses animals as a springboard to people. In more than 50 percent of the illnesses, contaminated ground beef was the source of the trouble.
Other cases were attributed to swimming water, day-care centers and even lettuce in one situation.
Quite an indictment.
A much brighter report, also dealing with some of the oddly endowed living things in this world, appeared on another page of that very same edition of USA Today.
This story was about the potential production, for human use, of spider silk, recognized as one of the softest yet toughest materials yet found on this planet. Inevitably, practical use of this organically manufactured thread has become a dream of certain practical human beings. They cite its super-suitability for making many useful things, among them parachute cords and bullet-proof fabrics.
Until recently this utilitarian vision has seemed a long way from realization, owing to the difficulty of massing and controlling enough spiders, as well as efficiently harvesting their gossamer output.
``Spiders need a steady stock of live insects to eat,'' explained the newspaper, ``and if they live too close to other spiders, they eat each other.''
The news of the moment, however, was that an alternative to the setting-up of arachnid factory-farms had emerged. Exciting research was under way looking to genetic tinkering with another, more industrially congenial form of life. The lab people are confident this other creature can be turned into a thread-spinner, too.
Putting millions of the altered species into harness, busily turning out soft, strong, spider-mimicking fibers, would meet the production requirements. And the necessary genetic work might be completed within as short a period as a decade, the researchers are saying.
And which of nature's prolific species so handily lends itself to the gene-retooling effort?
E. coli.
Nobody's all bad, they say. Same goes for germs, I guess. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.
by CNB