CHICAGO — Biologist Daniel Smith crouched in an empty patient
room at the new University of Chicago hospital and dragged a
white cotton swab across the gleaming tile. Smith studied the
dust-smudged tip before breaking it off into a plastic tube
labeled "floor." "A good sample for us," said Smith, securing
the tiny vial in a box chilled by dry ice. "Although you can't
see them, there are literally billions of (bacteria) cells on
these surfaces." Like scientists who began classifying the
world's plants and animals centuries ago, Smith and his
colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory are embarking on a
similar exploration, only in the micro realm. Over the next
year, they plan to trace the ebb and flow of the hospital's
microbiome — a vast wilderness of viruses, fungi and, perhaps
most importantly, bacteria — to better understand how it may
affect human health in an environment where about 100,000 people
die nationally every year from acquired infections. The effort,
known as the Hospital Microbiome Project, fo