(credit: CBSNewYork)
Reporting Alex Silverman
Filed under
Health, Heard On 1010 WINS, WCBS, WFAN, Local, News, NY News, Syndicated Local, Watch + ListenNEW YORK (WCBS 880) - In 1897, a time capsule was sealed up and hidden away in the cornerstone of what was Bellevue Hospital Medical College in Manhattan. Now, it has been found.
WCBS 880′s Alex Silverman On The Story
A few weeks ago, that building at East 26th Street and 1st Avenue was demolished.
The contents of the time capsule were recovered and they’re now in the hands of New York University bacteriologist Dr. Martin Blaser, who says it was no ordinary time capsule.
“In addition to papers from that time and materials from students from the Bellevue Medical College and the newspaper the New York Sun from 1897, it also had a test tube that had some bacterial spores in it that were gotten and cultured from a patient in 1896,” Blaser told WCBS 880′s Alex Silverman.
Blaser says his team is trying to wake up those spores and grow them so they can study the organisms.
“We are interested in the question of whether seventy years of antibiotics is changing the organisms that live in the body. The organism that was put in the time capsule was a normal organism that lives in the human body. By having this organism and comparing it to present day organisms, we may have a chance to answer the question of whether our own organisms are changing or not,” said Blaser.
Blaser says the specimen was put there by a bacteriologist named Edward Dunham. He says Dunham was one of the city’s early bacteriologists and that it was he who first described that these bacteria actually form spores.
Blaser says that scientists knew spores could last a long time, but they didn’t know how long. There was even a note saying that he hoped future generations would record how long they lasted.
What would you put in a time capsule? Share your ideas below!
174 Comments
Amazing how people can change a story to somehow wage politic wars in the comments section. this is a freaking story about bacteria, go somewhere else you politic trolls.
October 8, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Exactly what I was thinking. I mean, I hate stuff just as much as the next guy, but trolling is counterproductive.
October 9, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Poor you. You have no sense of humor.
October 9, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Actually, we’re just tired of the -same- damn joke, every freakin’ time.
October 9, 2011 at 3:04 pm
Only sad part is, it is no joke
October 9, 2011 at 5:01 pm
We are engaged in class warfare that super rich elitists have been waging against the other 99% for decades now, largely winning to such an extent that America’s core values which used to inspire the world have now succumbed to atrocities like preemptive wars, indefinite detentions, and torture. Theirs is the mentality that would weaponize if they could the old bacteria that is the subject of this article and use it against their fellow Americans if there was a way they could profit from doing so. That is what we are up against, they’ve already killed thousands of American soldiers to do their dirty work and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan innocents so you can take your infantile control freak attitude about what other people should and shouldn’t discuss in public forums and shove it where the sun don’t shine, Bubba. You get to regulate what YOU say and nothing else, capisce?
October 11, 2011 at 6:10 pm
@”more normal” clueless moron, we are engaged in class warfare that super rich elitists have been waging against the other 99% for decades now, largely winning to such an extent that America’s core values which used to inspire the world have now succumbed to atrocities like preemptive wars, indefinite detentions, and torture. Theirs is the mentality that would weaponize if they could the old bacteria that is the subject of this article and use it against their fellow Americans if there was a way they could profit from doing so. That is what we are up against, they’ve already killed thousands of American soldiers to do their dirty work and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan innocents so you can take your infantile control freak attitude about what other people should and shouldn’t discuss in public forums and shove it where the sun don’t shine, Bubba. You get to regulate what YOU say and nothing else, capisce?
October 11, 2011 at 6:22 pm
you got it beyond backwards ,capisce ? YOU CONTROL your infantile impulses and post your scatology where it belongs .
October 12, 2011 at 9:35 pm
Also notably, the construction worker who opened the cornerstone is said to have found a singing frog.
October 8, 2011 at 10:10 pm
“Hello ma baby, hello my honey,
Hello my ragtime gaaaaal … “
October 8, 2011 at 10:26 pm
HAHA!!! Fantastic!
October 8, 2011 at 10:28 pm
One Froggy Evening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRnX4quv5W4
October 9, 2011 at 2:34 am
HAHAHAAAAAAAA aaaaah I forgot about that.
October 14, 2011 at 2:52 am
I think I hear a predator drone flying over your house Rod!!!
October 8, 2011 at 9:06 pm
That is silly. The Government Panel that decides which Americans to kill doesn’t meet on weekends. Rod you have a good 2-3 days before you have to worry.
October 8, 2011 at 11:20 pm
I’d put in a worthless Federal Reserve note. It may be worth something as an antiquity someday. It can teach future generation to never use fiat money.
October 8, 2011 at 8:53 pm
Dear Ken Doll,
You have a great idea there! Better yet, send me a few bundles of your worthless fiat currency, and I will see that it is safely stored away.
Or perhaps you could use some to buy yourself an anatomically correct…….brain.
October 9, 2011 at 11:21 am
So you feel that a dollar backed by faith is a stable currency? For someone that speaks of others not having brains, I have to wonder if you’re just projecting your own inadequacies?
October 9, 2011 at 12:21 pm
The dollar is worth 3-5% of what it was back then. You aware that the great depression was a direct result of the fed setting low interest rates, and inflating the monetary base right? I know this doesn’t relate much to the story other than the fact that the federal reserve didn’t exist back then, but you have a big anatomically correct brain I am sure you can deal with some off subject points, right?
October 9, 2011 at 12:25 pm
The Roman emperors added base metals to their silver coins as a way of raising revenue. Hence a silver coin used during the reign of Julius Caesar had a much higher silver content (94%) than a “silver coin” (0.04%) used during the reign of Diocletian. Thanks to the information contained in old Roman coins, we can see that it is not the currency OR the coin which is to blame for seigniorage and inflation. The blame rests with those who tamper with the inherent value of our money.
October 9, 2011 at 1:06 pm
It’s a great idea. Researchers today should create a series of time capsules to help the future answer exactly these types of questions. Everything from bacteria and viruses to genes from plants, animals, and people. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune just some thought and effort.
October 8, 2011 at 8:22 pm
Contagion and the destruction of todays people because a science lab student drops it on floor. Spreading the intitial viral strain of Flu.
October 8, 2011 at 8:09 pm
Cap’n Trips lives!
October 9, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Democrats will want to add an ammendment to the Endangered Species Act. 100-year-old germs don’t grown on trees, you know.
October 8, 2011 at 7:57 pm
They may even want to add an amendment.
October 8, 2011 at 7:59 pm
A twinkie.
October 8, 2011 at 7:23 pm
scarily, it will probably have maintained its exact shape color and consistency. And be just as edible… ewww…
October 9, 2011 at 5:20 pm
I think you meant to say mmmm…
October 9, 2011 at 6:40 pm
This is how every Zombie movie starts…..
October 8, 2011 at 7:03 pm
It certainly may explain the zombie crowds in tents on Wall Street these days.
October 8, 2011 at 8:00 pm
Notice how filthy and anti-social they are (and that is why Keith Olbermann made an appearance). Just like zombies. Come to think of it, that does describe Progressives, doesn’t it?
Definitely NOT Tea Party people.
October 9, 2011 at 8:25 am
That’s right the Occupiers are DEFINITELY unlike any Teabaggers who have no souls because they are psychopaths without empathy or conscience, so all they care about is themselves and tax cuts for themselves, and as far as their fellow Americans needing healthcare, they’d just as soon see them suffer and die like wounded animals in the woods. The Occupiers in New York’s Liberty Park on the other hand are there for the other 99% of us and they are heroes working to improve America and the world instead of just pushing selfish and psychopathic agendas. Norman you are SO right that they are NOTHING like Teabaggers!
October 11, 2011 at 5:50 pm
Spores? I thought it said Smores. Never mind.
October 8, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Very interesting…
Unfortunately, we are now all going to die…
October 8, 2011 at 6:39 pm
Unfortunately we are all going to die …no matter what!
October 9, 2011 at 4:00 pm
See this preview tiny url for a short biography of Dr. Edward Dunham
http://preview.tinyurl.com/6yuaqsz
October 8, 2011 at 5:42 pm
I would put Barack Obama in it.
October 8, 2011 at 5:21 pm
That would be a cruel thing to do to future generations. As it is, they’ll be paying for his economic destruction, but the possibility of having his spores regenerate in the future is too horrific to ponder.
October 8, 2011 at 5:32 pm
Oh, GOD… Whhat if he mutated????????
October 8, 2011 at 6:40 pm
He is a MUTANT!!11
October 8, 2011 at 7:55 pm
He can’t possibly mutate into anything worse, that’s for sure.
October 9, 2011 at 10:44 am
How is this ‘time capsule’ different that what would be found diggin up 100 year old graves?
October 8, 2011 at 5:13 pm
100 year old graves are open to the elements and to interaction with other bacteria and chemicals. Sealed time capsules are….sealed.
October 8, 2011 at 5:33 pm
Some graves are sealed, the types of outer burial containers varied during this time and many would contain perfectly preserved specimens. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people entombed from this era. Essentially they are time capsules, but I would not want to be the one to open the capsule! P U
October 8, 2011 at 11:45 pm
I believe the bacteria they are referring to is Clostridium Difficile. It is a nasty bug you can get by taking one or two antitiotics. You can also get it from someone who didn’t wash his or her hands.
October 8, 2011 at 5:03 pm
First I had hopes for Y2K, then Bird Flu, then Pig Flu, Then X class solar flares. Quit getting my hopes up!
October 8, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Don’t forget listeria!
October 9, 2011 at 8:18 am
Talk about a “blast from the past”; sure do hope no one opens that Pandora’s Box.
October 8, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Wise is the man that plants a nut that grows a tree he’ll never sit in the shade of.
Congratulations to a great visionary. May his forethought be as valuable as it was intended.
October 8, 2011 at 3:48 pm
beautifully said
October 8, 2011 at 3:53 pm
It should be “man who” not “man that”.
October 9, 2011 at 12:28 pm
You ended in a preposition.
October 8, 2011 at 4:15 pm
“That is nonsense up with which I shall not put.” — Winston Churchill
October 8, 2011 at 4:49 pm
“I will not put up with that nonsense”
October 9, 2011 at 12:23 pm
“You ended in a preposition.”
You refer to a flexible convention, not a rule. Look it up.
October 8, 2011 at 5:34 pm
I ended in a proposition…
October 8, 2011 at 6:42 pm
A proposition I started with . . .
October 8, 2011 at 7:54 pm
We don’t need your stinking rules. This is the 21st century. We have grammatical freedom!!!!! Fascist.
October 9, 2011 at 2:57 am
Yes, no rules and less understanding.
October 9, 2011 at 12:47 pm
Makes me wnat to go plant some nuts.
October 8, 2011 at 5:56 pm
She died two months ago, you sick sob
October 8, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Join your local Tea Party, you’ll find nuts galore.
October 11, 2011 at 5:54 pm
“We are interested in the question of whether seventy years of antibiotics is changing the organisms that live in the body.”
Learning is good. Good learning is better.
The folks who are embarking upon this “learning” should take a a few semesters on rhetoric. It might save them some time.
October 8, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Obama’s balls would be a nice addition to the time capsule… Oh wait, he doesn’t have any!
October 8, 2011 at 3:19 pm
We got ABL because too many people knew that HE knew. Some secrets just cannot be kept.
October 8, 2011 at 4:17 pm
I think it was SEAL team, while the ‘windbreaker’ sat in a W.H. room in D.C. staring at a monitor. Realistic is an ‘idiot’.
October 8, 2011 at 4:20 pm
It was year’s of Bush’s terror fighting policies that got bin laden, not obama’s. He just gave to orders for the SEAL’s to pull the trigger! If Bush would of got OBL, the way obama did, you would have bitched about how he wasn’t given a FAIR trial!
What troops have come home? We are still in Afghanistan, Iraq and now in Libya, which is the ILLEGAL WAR! Congress APPROVED the war’s in IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN, NOT LIBYA!
October 8, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Bringing home troops? Who deployed our military resources to Libya, and extended the occupational timeline for Afghanistan an extra 15 years? Who’s raised the national deficit an extra $3 trillion through corporate stimulus plans funded by proletarian tax dollars? In other words, who’s the idiot now? The man who still has the audacity to question a government which strips its peoples of their rights, or the man who hasn’t put enough research into arguing a perspective his government told him to believe?
Revolution is right around the corner.
October 8, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Oh, he has huge balls and a whole lot of nerve.
Now, if he only had a brain…
October 8, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Do you mean the drones that have been infected by an unremoveable Chinese trojan which ultimately will program the drones to attack the U.S. Obama is killing America. Obama is the anti christ.
October 9, 2011 at 4:24 am
Most important, these bacteria–the taxonomy is not specified–existed long before the discovery of the first manmade antibiotic. Thus, it might not have genes for resistance against these drugs, such as are found in many bacteria today, such as Staphylococcus aureus. Perhaps a genetic study of these bacteria, if they indeed can be revived, might give clues as to how to reverse the increasing drug-resistance of bacteria. By the way, in some cases, drug resistance can originate in nature. I wrote an article about just that in Environmental Science & Technology, Nov. 1, 2006.
October 8, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Bless you! Would that I had applied myself, and obtained an educcation!
October 8, 2011 at 6:45 pm
Sir, are you sure that you’re not mistaken about the date of your article?
I believe that November has always been the Swimsuit Issue in that publication.
October 8, 2011 at 9:35 pm
I’d put Barack Hussein Obama and his wife in the time capsule. We’d be guaranteed that they couldn’t do anymore damage to this country for at least 100 years.
October 8, 2011 at 3:09 pm
That would be a cruel thing to do to people in the year 2111.
October 8, 2011 at 5:34 pm
There will BE no 2111…
October 8, 2011 at 6:46 pm
Marvin, Nobody cares about or wants your sperm. Go back to the Kleenex.
October 8, 2011 at 2:55 pm
My father was born in 1897, but that year is as remote to our eyes as the Crusades. When living memory is eclipsed, the past becomes a foreign country.
October 8, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Beautifully written. Time marches on, reality as we know it drifts slowly away, then disappears.
October 8, 2011 at 7:43 pm
I think we should put a dollar bill and a copy of the constitution – both soon to be extinct if we are not careful.
October 8, 2011 at 2:35 pm
That can be dangerous. What is the samples contain viruses of the Spanish influenza or something? Over so much time, our immunity to these viruses will have been lost after that many generations, leaving us wide open to these diseases. Remember how illnesses common to Europeans wiped out many peoples isolated from the European continent in the past, likewise, we have been isolated by the passage of time.
October 8, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Only bacteria form spores. Spores are the dormant form of those kinds of bacteria. Perhaps one should educate one’s self.
October 8, 2011 at 3:51 pm
No, mommy, it is you who needs an edgucashin. It’s spelled s-o-r-e-s and you can kill em with some backteen spray. Owie gone gone.
October 8, 2011 at 9:41 pm
Put Justin Bieber in a time capsule….or any other of the flash in the pan manufactured “talents’ of today.
October 8, 2011 at 2:04 pm
Likely Clostridium
Bacterial spores may be viable for 100′s of millions of years.
Cool!
If we dismantle made by man that is more than 20 years old, there will be plenty of work to go around. With the added bonus of a few surprise time capsules.
October 8, 2011 at 2:00 pm
This comment section.
October 8, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Its strange that the building was demolished before they found the time capsule. Didn’t anyone keep records at the hospital?
October 8, 2011 at 1:30 pm
I read a few years ago that over 50% of all time capsules are lost or forgotten.
October 8, 2011 at 4:06 pm
And I read that 85% of statistics are made up on the spot.
October 9, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Any piece of consumer electronics – no matter how slick or state of the art. Would be an obsolete oddity when the time capsule was opened up 100 years from now.
Throw an iPad in there. The folks in the future can all have a good laugh about how much buzz the iPad had in 2011.
October 8, 2011 at 1:12 pm
I think those bacteria and germs escaped and are marching down wall street! Ha ha ha ha hah ha!
October 8, 2011 at 1:09 pm
It’s pretty amazing if they can revive those spores and gather data from them. With today’s technology, who knows what can be learned that could help us today.
October 8, 2011 at 1:06 pm
These old germs can’t hurt you. They have to pee every ten minutes.
October 8, 2011 at 1:05 pm
And they nap frequently.
October 8, 2011 at 3:13 pm
OBAMA LEAVE HIM THERE FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS ONLY TO OPEN IF THE FUTURE IS STRONG ENOUGH NOT TO LET THE MENCE GROW OR ORGANIZE.
October 8, 2011 at 12:49 pm
And the Zombie apocalypse begins
October 8, 2011 at 12:47 pm
I would put my ex wife in it
October 8, 2011 at 12:35 pm
I thought about that too Bill but then I realized there was too good a chance she’d be found and I didn’t want to take the risk.
October 8, 2011 at 5:30 pm
I was wondering why I haven’t seen your wife around lately.
October 8, 2011 at 9:44 pm
If I had a time capsule I would put a couple of joints and a twelve pack of rubbers just in case science etc lets me live that long.
October 8, 2011 at 12:34 pm
you really should use a vaporizer. just saying…
October 8, 2011 at 9:46 pm
Any singing frogs? HELLO MY HONEY! HELLO MY BABY! HELLO MY RAGTIME GAL!!!!!!!!
October 8, 2011 at 12:33 pm
Wow… One hundred years ago someone named Dunham had a virus that had and wanted to preserve. Fifty years ago someone named Dunham created a virus and it became President. I wonder what the next fifty years will bring.
October 8, 2011 at 12:10 pm
That is a perfect analogy! Right on!!
October 8, 2011 at 1:07 pm
What to put in the time capsule?
A singing frog, of course.
October 8, 2011 at 11:49 am
Kermikt would NOT be interested !
October 8, 2011 at 3:00 pm
“Hello mah honey, hello mah baby….” lol
October 8, 2011 at 3:10 pm
“Hello mah honey, hello mah baby…” lol
October 8, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Pandora’s Box was opened by curiosity seekers. Just sayin’.
October 8, 2011 at 11:48 am
I would put beer in the capsule…but then I’d keep getting into it.
October 8, 2011 at 11:38 am
Well, well, more bacteria and more viruses for scientists to manipulate. Is this going to be the next big plague they put out to get rid of us?
October 8, 2011 at 11:37 am
Exacto! People need to research race-specific bio weapons, asap.
October 8, 2011 at 2:24 pm
I think Obama already beat you to it.
October 8, 2011 at 9:49 pm
Time to CRANK UP Bruce Willis Again!
October 8, 2011 at 11:15 am
That’s cool
October 8, 2011 at 11:14 am
Just suppose, the spores of a hundred years ago were not dangerous and now the human body is not immune to them…Contagion!!!!!
October 7, 2011 at 7:04 pm
It’s alive!
October 7, 2011 at 5:44 pm
Another movie possibility.
October 7, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Awesome!
October 7, 2011 at 3:03 pm