Beards: Suggestive of wisdom or harborers of disease

Anne Casselman at Inkling has this hysterical article on scientists/physicians with beards. Here's a bit on why some public health experts want doctors to lose the beard:

Fast forward to 1967, when three scientists from the Industrial Health and Safety Office in Maryland tested their hypothesis that "a bearded man subjects his family and friends to risk of infection if his beard is contaminated by infectious microorganisms while he is working in a microbiological laboratory." The result of their studies was a paper published in Applied Microbiology titled "Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men."

And I must admit, it was creatively thorough in its methods. Part of the experiment consisted of exposing the natural hair beard of a mannequin (see photo) to a virus, then getting baby chicks to nestle their cute fluffy heads against the beard, and later killing them to see if they caught the virus from their stints of beard nuzzling. Two of the three chicks caught the disease.

Now I have to dwell on this for a second because who, in their right mind, other than some maniacal sick twisted scientists with an easter fetish, would hug baby chicks to his bristled cheek in the lab, like ever??? Maybe the moral isn't to shave but to not rub your face against baby chicks. In which case one could take this a step further and say, don't hire crazy bearded people in your lab. (Emphasis mine.)

LOL.

I was also struck by this bit looking at why facial hair runs rampant in science departments:

So where does this leave the populace? Well, John Curran, an anaesthetist at Nottingham City Hospital and Brian Pollard, a senior lecturer in anaesthesia at Manchester Royal Infirmary found themselves disagreeing over what a beard really meant; Curran asserts that "they are dirty, suiting woolly minded academics disinclined to arise for the morning ablutions" while Pollard "believes that beards, a natural state of affairs, signify wisdom". So like any responsible scientist in a tiff, they conducted a controlled study and aired the results, and their debate in the December issue of the British Medical Journal.

I attribute it more to the laziness than the desire to look wise.

Being a grad student (or a medical student) is not an environment that tends to inspire excellent hygiene -- and this includes shaving. I spend most of my day training filthy animals in a private room. Who the hell am I supposed to please? More than that, it is a bad idea to wear nice clothes to the lab. I can't even count the number of times I had a shirt ruined by chemicals, effluvia, etc. Thus, I am fairly regularly sporting the 5 day mini-beard and dressed in clothes from the savers bin at the Salvation Army.

Doctors and scientists being themselves former students are more likely to continue in their slovenly ways.

All I have to say is first it's the ties, then it's the beards, and soon we all look like Che Guevara.

Definitely, read the whole thing.