When Louis Pasteur found that some germs are always present in the healthiest animals and men, he concluded that no animal or man could live without them.
But last week hundreds of lowly mice, rats, chickens and quail, and even a few grunting pigs, gave the lie to the great man by leading near-normal lives without a germ anywhere in them or on them. The fact that such animals can now be raised in quantity lets researchers, for the first time, study a "pure" infectious disease with only one kind of germ present. And truly germfree surgery on human patients, fulfilling a...
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