The laboratory discovery: Lobund and germ-free life

1928–1960s · BOUNDARY — NOTRE DAME / SOUTH BEND · ROW 2

The founding laboratory of this county's medicine stood at Notre Dame, and what it proved was that life could be raised with no germs in it at all: the Laboratories of Bacteriology at the University of Notre Dame — LOBUND, from Loboratories of Bacteriology, University of Notre Dame — built, under James A. Reyniers, the world's first program for the routine production and multi-generational rearing of germ-free animals. Reyniers inaugurated germ-free animal research at Notre Dame in 1928 and directed the program until 1958, with Philip Charles Trexler as his engineering partner; the Indiana Academy of Science's history of the laboratory runs the course 1928–1965. The pair, in the words of the scholarly history of the program, "first perfected the routine production of germ-free animals, and successfully maintained them over several generations" — extending, as that history puts it, "the bacteriological ideal of pure culture to encompass the whole organism," a "bacteriologically blank" animal, a biological tabula rasa against which the effect of any single germ could finally be measured.

The proof was an engineering proof before it was a biological one. Reyniers' slogan, reported by Science News-Letter on 17 August 1940, was "standardization through mechanization": he designed and built the sealed steel isolators — the Reyniers Germ-Free Steel Isolator line — in which animals were delivered by Caesarean section into sterile chambers, fed sterilized diets through sealed ports, and bred for generation after generation without microbial contamination. The university's own magazine of July 1949 called LOBUND "the world's first center of completely germfree animals reared for research," and carried the program's work in germ-free life, micrurgy, and what Reyniers named "biological engineering." Life magazine showed the laboratory to the nation on 26 September 1949 — technicians in diving suits passing through germicidal tanks — and the model propagated outward: commercial germ-free production (Taconic's, from 1961) descends from the Notre Dame pattern, and the germ-free mouse remains, in the age of microbiome science, a standard instrument the field reaches for daily.

For this ground the entry is boundary whole and nothing more. No laboratory of the Lobund pattern — and no laboratory of any pattern — has ever been seated in Clay or Harris townships; the care file's earliest medical text for the ground itself is observational, Dr. Louis Humphreys' January 1858 address on the "Diseases of the St. Joseph Valley," an account of ague read before the county medical society, printed in the care file at its own strength. Between Humphreys' observation (1858) and Reyniers' instrument (1928–58) lies the whole distance this section exists to mark: the valley's medicine was described from this ground's marshes, but it was proved — turned into a controlled, reproducible science — in a laboratory seated in South Bend's university, on the far side of the CDP line. Granger's share is the share of every place the germ-free model eventually served: its residents' care, and its research subjects' trials, run on methods this county's laboratory founded.

Sources:

1. Robert G. W. Kirk, "'Standardization through Mechanization': Germ-Free Life and the Engineering of the Ideal Laboratory Animal," Technology and Culture 53(1), 2012 (PMC 3394667) — Reyniers and Trexler, the pure-culture extension, the 1940 slogan.
2. Julian R. Pleasants, "History of Germfree Animal Research at Lobund Laboratory, University of Notre Dame, 1928–1965," Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science — germ-free research inaugurated 1932 in the first published report; Reyniers at Notre Dame from 1928, director to 1958 (the two start dates print as the sources give them: the program's inauguration and its first report).
3. Notre Dame: A Magazine, July 1949 (Notre Dame Archives, archives.nd.edu) — "the world's first center of completely germfree animals reared for research"; the LOBUND program statement.
4. Taconic Biosciences, "Production of Germ-Free Mice: Then and Now" (2016) — the 26 September 1949 Life coverage and the commercial descent of the Notre Dame techniques (1961).