Google has celebrated the birth of the inventor of the petri dish, Julius Richard Petri, who was born on May 31, 1852 with a doodle on its home page.
He studied medicine at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Academy for Military Physicians in Berlin and later worked at the Imperial Health Office with Robert Koch who is considered the father of modern bacteriology.
The doodle features six petri dishes which are swabbed by a hand. Images of bacteria grow and spread in the dishes.
Petri was not the first to use agar, a substance made from algae, to culture bacteria but he invented the standard dish in which it was done. The petri dish allowed for the better identification of bacteria and the diseases they caused. Petri dishes later moved from the laboratory to the class room where they are used by every pupil of biology.
Petri died on December 20, 1921.