Darwin had a big one. As did Plato and Aristotle. Pythagoras most certainly had one, a long one judging from his statue. Leonardo da Vinci’s grew to illustrious lengths later in life.
So why, if all these famous scientists had beards to stroke when being clever and contemplative, is sporting facial hair in the lab a big no-no? Well, it appears that facial hair provides a massive substrate on which bacteria can frolic and play. So much so that a bearded man wearing a face mask sheds significantly much more bacteria than a non-bearded man or woman. In fact the risk posed by the facial hair bacterial fallout is such that the authors of the February 2000 paper in Anaesthesia end their abstract with this line: Bearded males may also consider removing their beards. So it appears that a responsible doctor in this day and age should be sure to shave.
Not only does this run counter to the bearded examples set forth by such medical luminaries as Galer, Osling, Cushing and Freud but it also runs counter to the annals of history. A 16th century doctor by the name of Adrian Junius claimed that a beard provided protection against diseases.
And of course, there was the holy aspect. There had to be a good reason why God and Jesus failed to shave themselves, that didn’t come down to their busy schedules. Perhaps it was to protect themselves against throat illnesses, surmised one Victorian-era religious publication.
But anti-beard arguments also ran rife in pre-Victorian times: Beards trapped food and the stuff you spewed out when you sneezed. At a stretch, they could even go as far as to catch fire and trap vermin, some argued. This all came to a head in 1907, with a rather remarkable experiment. A French scientist took one bearded and one clean shaven man from the streets of Paris and asked each of them to kiss a woman, whose lips were previously swabbed with antiseptic. After each smooth, her lips were swabbed and the the cultures were smeared on agar. The hairy kiss, it turned out, was by far the more microbial-ly diverse.
Now this charming and simple experiment provides an objective and scientific argument against the beard but it was not always so. According to One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair by Allan Peterkin the Chicago Chronicle wrote in 1903 that the average beard harboured 200,000 “misanthropic microbes.” It didn’t end there. Peterkin cites another instance where a New Jersey legislator tried to introduce a filthy whisker tax, following in Russia’s footsteps.
The Anti-Beard Brigade
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.
Moving along. The other half of the experiment consisted of exposing four volunteers with 73 day old beards (why 73? it’s a prime number sure. But what significance does it have to facial hair growth? ) to bacteria, and seeing how well they retained the bacteria. Surprise, surprise, they retained much more bacteria than did plain simple skin. But what else is new?
There are other reasons why a beard is a risk in the modern day lab. For one, they get in the way of a tight seal on your respirator. And while the Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t ban facial hair outright they do say that if a good seal on your respirator is thwarted because of facial hair it must be trimmed or removed. But really, let’s be honest. Of course facial hair breaks the seal. One study in the American Industry Hygiene Association Journal from 1984 (just think back to the hair that era saw...like Ben ‘Obi-Wan’ Kenobi’s respectful beard in “Return of the Jedi") found that men with facial hair saw a 246 fold drop in the protection offered by a half-mask respirator compared to the clean shaven men.
So Then Why Do Scientists Love Them So Much?
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.
They surveyed the attendees of a recent anaesthetic scientific meeting and found that 21 (34%) of 62 academics wore beards or moustaches, compared with only five of the 83 (6%) British National Health Service consultants. This results was statistically significant and it begged the question: why did academic anaesthetists shave less than their colleagues in the NHS?
The two authors look inward for an answer. After all, Pollard, an academic, sports a moustache while Curran, a shaver, is an NHS consultant. But all they find are age-old quotes that support both sides of the debate.
So perhaps it’s all about weighing the pros and cons. Or mitigating the risks your beard pose to those around you. Or frequently washing your beard. Or passing up the opportunity to nuzzle with chicks when you’re sick with a virus that can leap from humans to birds. Or deciding that yes, Santa Claus and Darwin both got something right, asides from sacks of toys and evolution.