Touring a building with Jessica Green can be an unsettling experience. “We live nearly 90 percent of our lives indoors, but we know almost nothing about that environment,” she says as we push through the doors of the Lillis Complex, a four-story glass and concrete building on the University of Oregon campus in Eugene. “We don’t think about the wildlife in the air because we can’t see it. But it’s here.”
Inside the atrium, dozens of students bustle past on their way to class. Others chat with friends, send text messages, and order coffee from a small café. Meanwhile, in the air flowing around us and into our eyes, noses, mouths, and lungs, millions of microbes fight for survival. “Air isn’t empty,” Green continues. Not even close: A cubic meter of indoor air contains up to 10 million cells of bacteria. “Each one of us is shedding microbes from our bodies and resuspending microbes that have settled on the floor, on desks, on trash cans. They’re swirling all around us. We’re constantly walking through a microbial soup.”
Few scientists know more about that soup than Green, a 42-year-old theoretical ecologist and the director of the University of Oregon’s Biology and the Built Environment (BioBE) Center. Created just two years ago, the BioBE Center has quickly become a global hub for research into the biology of the great indoors. At the center, microbiologists collaborate with architects and evolutionary ecologists on research that may ultimately influence how buildings are designed and constructed in the coming decades. They believe creating a healthy indoor microbial environment is not merely a matter of wiping desks and mopping floors. Green says it has to start at the beginning, with the earliest conception in the architect’s mind.
To Green and her BioBE collaborators, the Lillis Complex is one giant petri dish. They have spent months sampling the microbes living in the building’s air and on floors, desks, chairs, and other active surfaces. The resulting DNA dataset will help them understand how the building’s various microbial populations function and interact. “Since Lillis was so recently built, we have a really good picture of the airflow through it,” Green says. “There are 12 HVAC units”—heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning—“that draw outside air in and route it through nearly 300 rooms. From each room a stream of air moves into the hallway, and they gather like tributaries into the river of this atrium, which draws warm air up and out vents in the fourth-floor atrium ceiling.”
As Green speaks, I start to feel like Keanu Reeves after he swallows the red pill in The Matrix. Just as the world around Reeves revealed itself as nothing but binary code, so the air around Jessica Green clouds up with imagined microbes. They’re kicking up in Pigpen-ish plumes at our feet. I mention this to her and she smiles. “In a way, it is kind of like that,” she says. “We walk into a room and create a microbial dust storm.”
