Maren McKenna

Basically, it's like a goopy substance made to be kind of like a flesh wound.

And we infect these wounds with bacteria with the staph.

Then they put this thousand-year-old recipe that had been standing there for nine days, they put it on the bacteria that was in the fake wound.

Obviously, we didn't think this was going to work.

No.

We thought, you know, well, given the ingredients, we might see some small killing effect on the bacteria, but it won't be anything to write home about.

They thought maybe it'd kill 10%, 20% of the bacteria.

But then when they came back the next day...

It was a staff massacre.

It went on a rampage.

It went on a staff rampage.

It was killing, you know, 99.99999% of these bacterial cells.

What?

Yeah.

First we thought we'd made some sort of mistake and this was some kind of fluke.

You know, we'd accidentally mixed up our plates or mislabeled something.

So.

They run the entire experiment again.

They grab the ingredients, mash them up, put them on some bacteria, and it happens again.

Just absolutely wiped out the bacteria in these fake wounds.