
“The Great Plate Count Anomaly” that is no more - alexwg
http://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2014/12/the-great-plate-count-anomaly-that-is-no-more.html#re
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paulsutter
Autoclaving components of the medium separately has been done since the 1970s.
Here's a paper published by my dad in 1975 in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. Look under Materials and Methods, Media. It's mentioned
like it's no big deal. They had tried a number of combinations, this is what
worked best for them.

[http://authors.library.caltech.edu/11146/1/SUTpnas75.pdf](http://authors.library.caltech.edu/11146/1/SUTpnas75.pdf)

EDIT: My dad has Parkinsons now. It's great to see him light up and talk about
his work.

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ChuckMcM
That is an awesome find. It has to feel pretty amazing to figure out that
something that has been "the standard" for so long is broken in a fairly
simple way.

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marze
Yeah. Like, how embarrassing.

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msie
I read somewhere else a theory of how buildup of hydrogen peroxide in the body
is what kills victims of septic shock.

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dalke
The only published reference I can find to that idea is
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038812/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038812/)
which was published earlier this year. It doesn't seem to have evidence based
on actually measuring H2O2 buildup, only an observation that various aspects
of sepsis, when seen elsewhere, are correlated with H2O2.

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dreamdu5t
Amazing to know how little we knew and experimented with such a popular
process used for so long. It makes me wonder what's undiscovered about other
processes we take for granted.

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dzdt
I am no expert on this topic, but this story has a strong "bad science
journalism" smell. The pattern is (1) longstanding complex open problem (2)
stupidly simple "solution" claimed as a panacea. Generally with this pattern,
the simple solution turns out to be well known among the top experts, and
really isn't a solution to the whole problem, just a tiny part of it.

