JAY BURNS
h i st o ry le sso n
Some of the pathogens that Sawyer cultured and mounted during his wartime service were doozies, including meningitis, diphtheria, anthrax, and gonorrhea.
‘Highest Ranking Officer’
Found in Carnegie Science Hall, a Bates biology professor’s historic teaching slides, created during World War I, feature a veritable What’s What of deadly pathogens — including one that infected a high-ranking Army officer by jay burns THE HAND-LETTERED LABEL on the World War I–era microscope slide is blunt: “Gonococci. Highest ranking officer in Marseille. W.H.S.” Translation: The slide contains the gonorrhea-causing Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria, presumably taken from a U.S. Army bigwig stationed in Marseille, France. “W.H.S.” stands for “William H. Sawyer,” a 1913 Bates graduate and later a longtime professor of biology, who prepared the slide while stationed at an Army lab in the French port city during the war.
The gonococci slide was among a trove of Sawyer’s historic teaching slides discovered in a Carnegie Science Hall storage room in April 2020. The slides feature a veritable What’s What of deadly pathogens that cause diseases like meningitis, diphtheria, and anthrax. (The samples are “fixed,” meaning dead and inert.) A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Bates, Sawyer earned a master’s degree from Cornell before attending one of the Army’s new laboratory schools, at Yale, to learn the basics of bacteriology and Fall 2021
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