Grades:

- 3 midterms (20%) held in lab

- final (15%)-comprehensive
- labs (25%)
- 94% is an A
- powerpoints online!

Describe how our ancestors improved food with the use of invisible microbes
- Used fermentation to preserve and enhance the taste of food.
o Probably learned about it by accident.
Give two examples of foods that have historically been produced by humans with the aid of
microbes.
- Bread, cheese, wine, yogurt
Explain how historical understandings of disease contributed to attempts to treat and contain
disease.
- They wanted to understand the invisible forces (microbes) that were leading to
death and sickness. They knew the diseases could be communicable which often
led them to isolate those infected.
- Otzi the Iceman (frozen mummy)
o Archaeologic evidence that prehistoric people attempted to treat illness and
infections
Describe how the causes of sickness and disease were explained in ancient times, prior to the
invention of the microscope
- The Greeks thought it was “bad air” and the Romans thought it was waterborne illness.
How did the discovery of microbes change human understanding of disease?
- “certain minute creatures [animalia minuta] grow there which cannot be seen by
the eye…cause serious diseases.” Marcus Terentius Varro
- Pasteur also was able to develop treatment for diseases such as rabies.
Describe key historical events associated with the birth of microbiology
1) Leeuwenhoek and the microscopic lens for a glimpse of microbes
2) Pasteur and Koch both were able to advance understanding and/or treatment dealing with
microbes
3) All the tools used in microbiology labs

People to Know:
Hippocrates
- 460-370 BC. Greek
- “Father of Western medicine”
- disease had natural, not supernatural, causes
o must come from natural causes within patients or their environments
Thucydides
- 400 BC
- “Father of Scientific History”
- cause-effect reasoning
- immunity
o Anthenian plague killed one third of the population. Get it once, but not twice.
Marcus Terentius Varro
- 100 BC
- things we cannot see (microorganisms) can cause disease.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
- 1670
- developed lens powerful enough to see microbes (bacteria and protists)
Pasteur
- showed that individual microbial strains had unique properties and demonstrated that
fermentation is caused by microorganisms
- invented pasteurization
o a process used to kill microorganisms responsible for spoilage
- developed vaccines for treatment of disease (rabies)
- “All life from life”
Koch
- indentified the specific microbes that caused anthrax, cholera, tuberculosis
- used agar (gelling agent) instead of gelatin
- a lot of his ideas came from his wife, Fannie Hesse
Hooke
- 1665 published Mirographia
- creator of some of the first compound light microscopes
Van helmont
- founder of pneumatic chemistry
John Needham
- 1745
- boiled loosely sealed flasks of meat broth
- concluded that microbes came from nonliving things
Schleiden and Schwann
- plant and animal cells

Vocabulary:
Bunsen burner: can be used to sterilize equipment.
- Being replaced by microincinerators (eliminates risks of an open flame)
Endosymbiosis: deals with chloroplasts and mitochondria
Growth media: are used to grow microorganisms in a lab setting.
- Liquids, solids, or gel-like
- Provides nutrients (water, salt, and carbon…)
- Held in petri dish or test tubes
Inoculation loop: handheld tool that ends in a small loop.
- Must be sterilized to avoid contamination.
microbes: generally, an organism that is too small to be seen without a microscope; also known
as a microorganism
microbial fermentation: a process that uses bacteria, mold, or yeast to convert sugars
(carbohydrates) to alcohol, gases, and organic acids.
Stains and dyes: some stains only work on certain microbes because of differences in their
cellular chemical composition.