ABSTRACT
If the pioneering German bacteriologist Robert Koch visited a microbiological testing laboratory in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, or medical device industry today, he would recognize that most of our techniques were first developed or used in his laboratory at the Imperial Health Office and then later at the Institute for Infectious Diseases in the German imperial capital of Berlin during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. These methods include the fixing and staining of bacterial cells on glass slides for microscopic examination and photomicroscopy, growth of colonies on solid media, streaking for isolation of pure cultures on solid media, the use of agar-agar as a support for microbiological media in Petri dishes, serial dilution and plating on solid media to enumerate the microbial population in water, monitoring bacteria within the air, the classification of bacteria by their cellular morphology and differential staining, sterilization of microbiological media by filtration or steam sterilization, disinfectant testing, and aerobic and anaerobic incubation. Ironically, the very success of these classical pure culture techniques in elucidating the role of microorganisms as infectious agents of disease has led to a general conservatism in the implementation of new microbiological methods in routine clinical, food, and pharmaceutical microbiological testing laboratories. In this survey of the historic development of microbiological techniques, emphasis is given to the introduction of new methods, concepts, and technologies, and the publication of standard methods as background to the more detailed discussion, in subsequent chapters of this book, of the application and acceptance of rapid microbiological methods in the pharmaceutical industry.
