88 
In doing so, I am not trying to minimize the importance of what is 
being discussed. Obviously, if an E^_ coli is inoculated with botulinus or 
diphtheria toxin, a great disaster may eventuate. But as a clinical inves- 
tigator who has worked with pathogenic microorganisms for 25 years, I think 
it is important for the lay audience to appreciate that research with po- 
tentially hazardous organisms is going on all the time, and it is going on 
primarily to understand better at a clinical level the pathogenesis of 
infection, with attempts to prevent it or to cure it. 
The fact of the matter is that the human host is a remarkably hardy 
biological being, and that with all of the pathogens about, we happen to 
survive remarkably well. In my own experience, for example, having worked 
in the 1950s with virulent Staphylococci , which at that time were causing 
major disease, having worked subsequently with Streptococci , with both the 
gonococcus and the meningococcus, which happens to cause infectious menin- 
gitis and which is a somewhat hazardous organism, and having worked a great 
deal with E^_ coli , I am not aware that nationally or locally in our own 
operation that we had a single laboratory accident among either the investi- 
gators or all of the ancillary personnel that worked in the laboratory. 
I might say, without again minimizing what Dr. Barkley said, that these 
were all done in PI laboratories, and I wish that the investigators had ob- 
served the conditions prescribed, because if I had a buck for everybody who 
pipettes while smoking cigarettes, I would be a very wealthy man. 
Now, let us talk a little bit about E^_ coli , because this is the organ- 
ism which has come to the fore this morning. All of us have somewhere be- 
tween 10^ and 1C>9 of E^_ coli per gram of feces in our bowels. In the 
normal human host E^_ coli causes remarkably little disease. It is a non- 
infective and non-invasive organism, and it causes infection primarily in 
individuals who have decreased host resistance and who have structural 
abnormalities where 15^ coli can gain entrance. For example, in males it 
rarely causes infections in the kidneys unless a catheter is put in and the 
organisms have the opportunity to get up into the urinary tract or sit in 
the bladder, and to multiply there. In most of those instances the illness 
they cause is quite benign and in very few is the illness serious. 
Thus, most of us, despite the fact that we exist with these organisms, 
this is not the strain which has been talked about here which is really 
quite attenuated. It causes us remarkably little harm, and only recently, 
for example, have a few strains been described that may cause an illness 
akin to traveler's diarrhea, but even that isn't as well established as per- 
haps it should be. 
The other thing we ought to know about E. coli is that E. coli has, 
in fact, in nature undergone the process that we talked about today, the 
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