IT can take years, sometimes decades, for the commercial applications of a scientific or intellectual breakthrough to become apparent â?? like the notion that brainless bacteria communicate through networks to cause diseases that can also wreak social or economic havoc. [. . .]
Quorum sensing has captured the interest of a new generation of scientific researchers. One of them is Helen E. Blackwell, an organic chemist and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her bachelorâ??s in chemistry in 1994, when quorum sensing was on the rise, and then earned a doctorate in organic chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and received a post-doctoral appointment at Harvard, but she did not hear of quorum sensing until she joined the faculty at Wisconsin in 2002.