It’s easy to forget how much illness and death was caused by our food and drink just one hundred years ago. Our modern food systems, backed by sound research and decent regulation, have elevated food safety to the point where outbreaks of illness are big news. If you get sick from a burger, or a nice tall glass of milk, it’s no longer a mystery what happened. Instead we ask why, and “who screwed up?”

In the early 20th century though, many food-borne illnesses were still a mystery, and microbiology was a scientific endeavor that was just getting started. Alice Catherine Evans was an unlikely figure to make a dent in this world at the time, but through her research at the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA), and later at the Hygienic Laboratory (now the National Institute of Health) she had a huge impact on the field of bacteriology, the dairy industry, and consumer safety.

Childhood and Education

In her memoirs, Alice describes her childhood and continuing education as a straight path with limited options:

Until my academic education was completed I seemed never to have an opportunity to make a choice in matters concerning my future. I always stepped into the only suitable opening I could see on my horizon.

Growing up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, her primary education took place in the local one-room schoolhouse with “good teachers most of the time”. With no high school available in her district, she traveled to a nearby town for her secondary eduction.

Without the financial means to attend college, she pursued the only professional career available to women at the time: teaching. She taught grades 1–4 for four years, but despite finding the children interesting, she quickly grew bored with teaching the same curriculum over and over again. “I was glad when I found a way to escape”, she said of that time.

Her escape was facilitated by another opportunity that presented itself: the College of Agriculture at Cornell University started offering a tuition-free two-year course for rural teachers intended to help them foster a love of nature in their students. Using savings from her time spent teaching, she attended this Nature Study course, and studied botany, zoology, entomology, ornithology, geology, and meteorology. By the time she was done with her studies, she was hooked:

I was no longer interested in obtaining the certificate to which I was eligible. My interest in science had been whetted by the basic courses I had taken, and I wanted to continue the study of science – any branch of biologic science would satisfy me.

Luckily, at this time the college was accepting out-of-state students, tuition-free, to its regular courses. With the help of a scholarship, Evans was able to complete her B.S. in Agriculture in another two years. Being generally uninterested in the study of applied agriculture, she chose to specialize in the only pure science available to her: bacteriology.

Finally, on the recommendation of a professor at Cornell, Evans applied for and won a scholarship studying bacteriology …read more

Source:: Hackaday