Karen Torgaly

He had to work his way through school and did that by getting jobs in other labs.

And one of the jobs he had was...

figuring out what kind of bacteria pneumonia patients had that was making them sick.

So there were different strains of pneumococcus pneumonia bacteria.

And to find out what it was, he would get sputum specimens from the people who were coughing things up from their lungs.

And then he would make a mixture and inject it into mice in the lab and then wait for the bacteria to grow.

And the next day he would open up their abdomens and see what kind of bacteria they had.

Well, when it took overnight and these people were so severely ill, lots of them died before he got the answers he needed.

So he figured out a way to maybe make it a faster system.

So what he did was instead of sacrificing the mice after he injected them, he just let it grow on their abdomens for two or three hours.

And then he inserted a little hollow tube and would get some fluid out of the mice that way.

And it didn't hurt them.

And he found out that he could get results within two or three hours instead of waiting overnight.

So this was big news in their world because so many people were dying of pneumonia.

They didn't have antibiotics then.

All they could do was treat them with antiserum to that particular kind of bacteria.

That was his first paper.

He had not finished medical school at all.

And when he did graduate from medical school...

He was asked a question on his exam, what's the name of the test for identifying bacteria in pneumonia patients?