With a light plop, another cell phone lands in the muck, ushering in a loss of innocence for a device of such otherworldly lustre. “My eighteen-month-old recently dropped my iPhone in the toilet,” Michael Fischbach, a biochemist at the University of California-San Francisco, said. But he’s not easily fazed by bacteria. “Surprisingly, when I took it out, it still worked. I rinsed it in the sink and went on with my business.” He laughed, “Perhaps I worry less about this than other people do.”
Other people worry plenty. For them, the glass company Corning unveiled an invention this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas: “Antimicrobial Corning Gorilla Glass.” The Gorilla part isn’t new; it’s Corning’s brand of strengthened glass, which many smartphones already use. But incorporating an agent that pulverizes microbes is an idea ripe for grime-fearing techies—a sanitizer for the optimized lifestyle. The development was immediately cheered by hypochondriacs, thrilled to discover that “Corning created glass that literally murders the germs infecting your smartphone,” as one blog put it.
The glass is made with silver ions, which have been noted for their antimicrobial effect since 400 B.C., when Hippocrates promoted the use of silver for treating wounds. Joydeep Lahiri, the lead scientist and program director for Corning’s anti-microbial glass, said that “unlike typical antibiotics, it actually interacts with bacteria in many ways.” So many ways, he went on, “that it’s typically hard for bacteria to come up with a resistant version.” Because silver’s antibacterial attack is multi-pronged, the precise mechanism at work is difficult for scientists to pin down. “It seems to disrupt the oxygen metabolism inside bacterial cells,” Fischbach said. “Bacterial cells require oxygen to survive just as humans do, but when oxygen undergoes certain chemical reactions, it can become very toxic. Silver seems to cause trouble.” When Corning tested its silver ion-infused glass, Lahiri said, the amount of bacteria on its surface was reduced by 99.9 per cent—a number so neat that it practically sells itself.
But the wholesale slaughter of bacteria can be unpredictable, even when guided by the best intentions. Jonathan Eisen, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies microbial communities, said that wiping out all of that bacteria might have unforeseen consequences on the microbiome—the entire universe of bacteria in, on, and around our bodies. “I’m skeptical that we’ve got some chemical or physical treatment that does something good when we don’t even know what the baseline is,” Eisen told me, referring to what kinds of bacteria—and how much—one should expect to find on a perfectly safe phone. “We don’t know what we want to kill. It’s kind of like saying, ‘Tigers are killing people, let’s kill all the animals.’ ”
Lahiri assured me that the glass wouldn’t wreak havoc. “Reducing bacteria is a good thing,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with reducing bacteria. We’re not trying to reduce bacteria by putting antimicrobial agents all over. It’s not like your antibacterial soap, or antibacterial washing machines,” both of which have sundered reputations among those who fear that these products might mess with the ecosystem. “Folks shouldn’t be worried,” Lahiri said.
Corning’s promotional materials state that “thousands of bacteria live on a mobile device surface,” a figure that elicits horrible visions of wiggling invaders, crawling beneath your fingers and into your ear—how many hours do you spend on the phone each day?—while every time you’ve placed it on a dive-bar counter or a park bench flashes before your eyes. (And what about the back of a phone, which isn’t covered in germ-killing glass?) Most of the bacteria on your phone are harmless, though. In a study, led jointly by Eisen and the environmental microbiologist Jack Gilbert, the types of bacteria partial to phones were all found to be varieties common to human skin. Geórgia Barguil, a member of the research team, which had also taken bacteria samples from shoes, wrote, “Although many of the groups found both in shoes and phones have pathogenic representatives, you should not be scared, as it does not mean that you are going to get sick.”
At C.E.S., Lahiri conducted experiments of his own, taking swabs from the smartphones of the technoscenti. “We measure the amount of contamination, and what we find is that some phones have very high levels of contamination,” he said. “So if you have an antimicrobial phone, then you have the comfort of knowing that the level of bacteria is reduced.”
For those who are regularly exposed to pathogens, it may be worth taking every precaution, for reasons beyond avoiding a cold. In medical wards, where health-care workers increasingly use mobile devices, there’s a greater risk of contamination, according to a study published in the Journal of Hospital Infection. But the sanitation standards of a hospital ought to be a cut above—we’d prefer antimicrobial catheters, for instance. As for the rest of us, Fischbach said, “People don’t keep dropping dead all the time from using touchscreens.”
An invention need not fix so long as it can entice, and germaphobes make for enthusiastic customers. Fischbach went on, “I’m guessing this will be a successful product regardless of whether it solves a real or perceived problem.”
Photograph by S. Lowry/Univ Ulster/Getty.