This reminds me of a novel I read - whose title I won't mention, due to spoilers - where one alien civilization effectively caused the collapse of another one by infecting them with an engineer bacteria that ate all of their super-conductors.
This was the basis for Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971 novel), which was adapted from an episode of Doomwatch (1970 UK TV), which was inspired by the fighter jet crash scene in The Andromeda Strain (1969 novel), where the organism ate through a plastic hose. There was another UK show where a fungus destroyed all the paper.
In the present article, the problem is that dissolvable sutures are made out of biodegradable polycaprolactone, and there's a Pseudomonas biofilm that can grow on polycaprolactone, so it's an infection problem.
Geemail1802 · 5h ago
Reminds me of the Andromeda Strain where a microbe of extraterrestrial origin digested the containment seals being used by the scientists who were trying to study it.
pavel_lishin · 3h ago
Not what I was thinking of, but another excellent example.
Did they actually confirm that it was an extra-terrestrial bacteria? I thought they just scooped something up from the upper atmosphere during a test flight. [Edit: looked it up, you're totally right, I'm either mis-remembering the plot, or maybe the movie adjusted this element?]
apothegm · 2h ago
Yeah, my memory matches yours. Not extraterrestrial in the sense of “from another planet” but found when investigating the crash of a satellite or something to that effect.
ne0flex · 2h ago
Was curious what book this is, so I copy-pasted your summary and prefaced it with "what book is the one" and it gave me the correct title and author. Looking forward to reading this!
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
Would you mind emailing me what it said the book was? I'm curious if it got it right. (I can't imagine there's that many books out there with that plot point, though!)
stjo · 2h ago
It must be quite a title if it is more revealing than the summary itself.
pavel_lishin · 2h ago
Well, the point of me not revealing a title is so that if you run across this book later, you won't think, "OH! This is the one where Pavel said X happens!"
A spoiler by itself, without a link to the book, isn't a spoiler at all, which is why I didn't include the title.
If you're curious, I can drop five recommendations for good books, one of which is the work I'm referring to :)
amluto · 2h ago
It’s a rather famous sci-fi universe by a well known author, and I don’t think this particular revelation would spoil much of it.
This was the basis for Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971 novel), which was adapted from an episode of Doomwatch (1970 UK TV), which was inspired by the fighter jet crash scene in The Andromeda Strain (1969 novel), where the organism ate through a plastic hose. There was another UK show where a fungus destroyed all the paper.
In the present article, the problem is that dissolvable sutures are made out of biodegradable polycaprolactone, and there's a Pseudomonas biofilm that can grow on polycaprolactone, so it's an infection problem.
Did they actually confirm that it was an extra-terrestrial bacteria? I thought they just scooped something up from the upper atmosphere during a test flight. [Edit: looked it up, you're totally right, I'm either mis-remembering the plot, or maybe the movie adjusted this element?]
A spoiler by itself, without a link to the book, isn't a spoiler at all, which is why I didn't include the title.
If you're curious, I can drop five recommendations for good books, one of which is the work I'm referring to :)