Scenes from the many lives of Escherichia coli.

Can bacteria be famous? If they can, then which are the most famous and why? In this paper we will put our candidate for the world’s most famous bacterium onto the stage, literally, give it a voice – or rather a few voices – and show how Escherichia coli grew in importance and watched its identities proliferate at the same time as its discoverer – bacteriology.

So we present a play showing E. coli on an odyssey to discover itself that takes it from a children’s clinic in Bavaria to high-tech contemporary university labs, via hospitals and medical schools, wastewater treatment plants and government offices tasked with slowing antimicrobial resistance. Names are important and we’ll see how naming this bacterium changes our relationship to it , just as the disciplines, and tools, of those naming and making these microbes also shift .

It’s not easy to put words in the mouth of a microbe. For a start we asked ourselves, ‘Shouldn’t that be mouths?’ When encountered by humans E. coli is always plural. Yet that same plurality also introduces the issue of generation. The E. coli made visible in laboratories – clinical, environmental or scientific – tend to end their lives soon after in the autoclave. Confronted with these difficulties we use the singular to gesture to the ontological stakes , even as we multiply coliform identities . Looking across the decades, our hero has a dizzying number of these identities, though as we show many of the practices involve familiar actors such as Petri dishes, Falcon and Durham tubes, agar, Bunsen burners, slides and microscopes . Nonetheless, from the perspective of E. coli we suggest it is unsettled, restless, fixed and stained, but misunderstood, accused and ignored.

Joining a tradition of experimental writing in STS we take inspiration from classical Greek theatre, using a Chorus to represent the assemblages forming and decomposing, and its Leader to help us navigate. Like the writers of this time we also invoke higher powers, the Gods and Muses, to help us tell our tales.

The play

The slides

You can view the slides of the play as a PDF.

The script

You can download the script of the play as a PDF.

With thanks to the cast

• Thalia: Josie Counsell
• Leader of the Chorus: Dr Catherine Will
• Theodor Escherich MD: Professor Dirk van Lem
• Chorus: Dr Mark Erickson
• Voice of the Laboratory: Dr Georgina Lloyd
• Coliform, B. coli, E. coli: Joe Davin
• Geneticist: Professor Robert Dingwall
• Harriette Chick: Dr Lesley Cann
• Alfred McConkey MD: Brian Blaney
• Leonard Dudgeon: Dr Eric Will
• E Napier Burnett: Gavin Middleton
• Edward H. Kass MD: Dr Matt Baum
• Microbiologist: Dr Sarah Purnell
• Microbiologist: Dr Diogo Gomez da Silva
• Wastewater narrator: Professor James Ebdon
• Sally Davis: Professor Bobbie Farsides
• Hospital lab director: Dr Ulla McKnight
• Voice of Journal Science: Professor Steve Fuller
• Molecular biologist: Dr Doug Browning
• EUCAST: Professor Tilda Paananen
• Data Scientist: Dr Alena Kamenshchikova
• Public Health England: Sarah Chadwick
• Epidemiologist: Dr Eleanor Kashouris
• Clio: Mili Erickson-Bragg
• Melpomene: Dr Sara Bragg