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Plasma-Filled Bags Could Replace the Petri Dish
Zothecula writes "The humble Petri dish may soon be a thing of the past. A team of researchers in Germany have developed a new technique for treating plastic bags with plasma to turn them into sealed, sterile containers suitable for microbiology work with much less chance of contamination than traditional containers. This holds the promise of not only decreasing the possibility of contamination in stem cell and live-cell therapy techniques, but also the potential for cultivating whole human organs for transplant surgery."
I don't know about plasma, but gas-filled for sure.
(http://www.etymonline.com/ plasma 1712, "form, shape" (earlier plasm, 1620), from L.L. plasma, from Gk. plasma "something molded or created," from plassein "to mold," originally "to spread thin," from PIE *plath-yein, from base *pele- "flat, to spread" (see plane (1)). Sense of "liquid part of blood" is from 1845; that of "ionized gas" is 1928)
If we'd had this before, we could have completely failed to discover Penicillin.
I believe the discovery of Penicillin was rooted in an observation (a great scientific tool) that peasants didn't seem to suffer certain ailments as often as their masters (so to speak.) A theory (another great scientific tool) was formed, the difference may be diet related (Lord knows the peasant and labourer lived in pretty filthy surroundings.) Examination (yet another great scientific tool) of diet revealed the hardy peseants eating mouldy bread. The bread mould was tested (gads, science is amok with great tools!) in a petri dish and found to kill certain bacilli (which should have been no surprise because certain of the funghi family mistook for the more edible varieties can kill people, with or without a petri dish.) Perhaps it could have been observed in a bag, but bags are so difficult to get under a microscope.
Science - It's full of tools.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Contamination has been a huge issue in human cell research. A line called HeLa contaminated a large number of experiments, meaning that basically all the research on human cells in vitro from an entire era was called into doubt. The story of the HeLa line is remarkable; they are immortal cancer cells from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. The cells weren't just contaminants; they played a major positive role in a lot of science. Lacks was never asked her permission, and her family never knew for decades afterward that her cells had made such a contribution to medicine.
Find free books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
The ways in which one atmosphere plasmas modify material properties, such as with this plastic bag, aren't new at all. My college professor in a graduate course on nuclear fusion (an elective while I was an undergrad) discussed them more than a decade ago. The only thing I see that is remotely new is creating the plasma after the bag is sealed, rather than creating the plasma externally and then piping it into the bag.
Unfortunately the technology got all tangled up with the government, and then a number of people (including my former professor) were arrested for sharing "secrets" about this technology with "foreign nationals". So of course now all the public scientific advances in this field have to come from some other country.
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/jun/24/atmospheric-glow-to-sell/
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
This seems more like marketing hyperbole than anything else. They're just sterile bags (though the pictures of the plasma sterilization are kind of cool). You don't need plasma to sterile a bag: if we really wanted to use bags for tissue culture, we would have had them 30 years ago.
As a graduate student in the field, I can tell you that the humble petri dish has FAR too may uses, and is far too easy to use, to ever be replaced by something as awkward as a bag for pretty much anything. I suppose that the bags could perhaps be used for some function that's currently being served by the (also enclosed and sterile) flasks that we usually use for tissue culture tissue culture, but bags are harder to stack in an incubator, where space can often be in short supply.
Whiz-bang hyperbole aside, plasma-sterilized bags will probably find a niche use in which it would be handy to culture in a container that can be easily cut away, tissue engineering comes to mind, but to assert that petri dishes are going the way of the dodo is patently absurd.
"Your nasty bathroom's a plasma-filled bag" just doesn't roll off the tongue like "Your nasty bathroom's a petri dish".
Congratulations, scientists.
After thousands of years to hone your skills, you have achieved the ultimate pinnacle of biological knowlege:
Turns out, a uterus is a good idea for growing organic things.
In another thousand years, they might come up with an equally brilliant invention: a "post-uteral sustanance device, with intuitive interface"
They could call it a Biogrowth-Optimized Organic Bladdersack