This article appeared in the September/October 2020 issue of Discover magazine as "Architecture of Healing." Subscribe for more stories like these.
In February 2013, the Center for Care and Discovery, a 10-story hospital in Chicago, officially opened its doors. As the first patients began to stream in, they brought their microbes with them. They shed bacteria in the lobby, sprinkled viruses around the hallways, deposited fungi in their beds. And they shared these microorganisms with their fellow patients, passing them along to subsequent occupants of their rooms.
When a patient moved into a new room, their body was “actually colonized briefly [by] some of the bacteria in the room — the previous occupant’s bacteria,” says microbial ecologist Jack Gilbert, who led a yearlong study of microbes in the new hospital. And that was true even if the room had been cleaned, he says.
After one day, however, the flow of microbes reversed, streaming from the patient’s body to the surfaces in the room. Within 24 hours, the microbes on the bedrail, the faucet and other surfaces closely resembled those that the patient had brought in with them. After the patient was discharged, the cycle would repeat itself, with the room’s new resident at first acquiring the previous patient’s microbes, and then sprinkling their own microorganisms around the space: an endless game of microbial telephone.
