12. Item 106: Bacterial Culture

“Item 106: A bacterial culture petri dish portrait of Jonas Salk. Tweet this to Melinda Gates thanking her for her work vaccinating children.”

Most teams that accomplished this item either did it with paint (guilty) or DIYed some bacteria creations. A teammate from Big Test Icicles works in an actual lab, so she was able to get fancy with the item. She said: “I’m kind of a hermit at work, despite being in an open lab. I have never cultured bacteria (at least not on purpose), so I needed help with making agar, how to incubate them, and what to use to draw my portrait…”

She went on to say, “I went to work on my vacation and it helped me push outside of my comfort zone about making requests, especially with something so silly. Everyone just laughed with me, though. I am a huge vaccine and science nerd, so I was thrilled to see a pro-vaccine science art item.” If anything is going to make people branch out of their comfort zones, it’s definitely the delightfully weird items on the GISH list. The new GISH tagline should be: “Turning introverts into extroverts since 2011.”