The Laboratory Discovery: Germ-Free Life at Notre Dame — and No Laboratory Seated Here

Item 2 · Boundary (South Bend / Notre Dame) + town test

Lead: The county's laboratory discovery whole is the germ-free life program at the University of Notre Dame — South Bend's, at boundary size here. James A. Reyniers inaugurated germ-free animal research at Notre Dame in 1928 and directed the program until 1958; his first published report of germ-free animal rearing appeared in 1932. Philip C. Trexler joined him as a laboratory assistant in 1932. Their organisation, LOBUND — the Laboratories of Bacteriology, University of Notre Dame — pursued germ-free life, micrurgy, and what Reyniers coined “biological engineering.” Notre Dame's own magazine in July 1949 called LOBUND “the world's first center of completely germfree animals reared for research.” The scholarly history is more precise and is carried here alongside, unmerged: Reyniers and Trexler “first perfected the routine production of germ-free animals, and they successfully maintained them over several generations,” designing the germ-free animal from the start as a generic research tool — a “bacteriologically blank” organism against which the effect of any single germ could be studied in isolation. That is what the program proved: that higher animals could live, grow, and reproduce across generations with no microbes at all, settling by construction a question that ran back to Pasteur. Its instruments were Reyniers's steel isolators; its afterlife ran outward — barrier-containment technology of the kind later applied in the plastic bubble for immunodeficient patients, per the successor institute's own history, which also records that Reyniers left Notre Dame in 1959 to found germ-free laboratories in Florida. The town-side equivalent was tested directly: searches for a founding or research laboratory seated in New Carlisle returned only patient-care laboratory services — the South Bend Clinic site's laboratory services noted in Item 1, and a veterinary clinic's laboratory services — and no research laboratory, institute, or germ-free or other founding program seated in the town or Olive Township. A searched negative, printed whole: the laboratory first that serves this county was made a few miles east, and none was made here.

Sources:

1. Julian R. Pleasants, history of the Lobund Laboratory, Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science — germ-free research inaugurated at Notre Dame in 1928 by James A. Reyniers, directed by him until 1958; first published report 1932.
2. Robert G. W. Kirk, “Standardization through Mechanization: Germ-Free Life and the Engineering of the Ideal Laboratory Animal,” Technology and Culture 53(1), 2012 (PMC3394667) — Reyniers and Trexler first perfected routine production of germ-free animals, maintained over several generations.
3. Notre Dame: A Magazine, July 1949 — LOBUND constituted for germ-free life, micrurgy and biological engineering; “the world's first center of completely germfree animals reared for research”; Trexler joined 1932.
4. Rumbaugh-Goodwin / Leo Goodwin Institute for Cancer Research, History page — Reyniers founded it in 1959 out of the LOBUND Institute, where he developed barrier-containment technology enabling germ-free breeding, with eventual application to the plastic bubble for immunodeficient patients.
5. Town test: web searches for a research laboratory in New Carlisle, Indiana (see Item 1 sources) — clinic and veterinary laboratory services only; no research laboratory found.