THE CURE FOR ALL DISEASES
tect as little as 100 fg/ml (femtograms per milliliter). A milliliter
is about as big as a pea, and a femtogram is
1/1,000,000,000,000,000th (10-15) of a gram!
- Rinse the glass cup measure with filtered water and put one
half teaspoon of table salt in it. Fill to one cup, stirring with
a plastic spoon. What concentration is this? A teaspoon is
about 5 grams, a cup is about 230 ml (milliliters), therefore
the starting concentration is about 2½ (2.5) gm per 230 ml,
or .01 gm/ml (we will discuss the amount of error later). - Label one clean plastic spoon “water” and use it to put nine
spoonfuls of filtered water in a clean glass bottle. Use
another plastic spoon to transfer one spoonful of the .01
gm/ml salt solution in the cup measure to the glass bottle,
stir, then discard the spoon. The glass bottle now has a 1 in
10 dilution, and its concentration is one tenth the original,
or .001 gm/ml. - Use the “water” spoon to put nine spoonfuls of filtered
water in bottle #2. Use a new spoon to transfer a spoonful
of salt solution from bottle #1 to bottle #2 and stir briefly
(never shake). Label bottle #2 “.0001 gm/ml”. - Repeat with remaining bottles. Bottle #13 would therefore
be labeled “.000000000000001 gm/ml.” This is 10-15
gm/ml, or 1 femtogram/ml. - Do the skin test with water from bottle #13 as in Lesson
Five. If you can detect this, you are one hundred times as
sensitive as an ELISA assay (and you should make a bottle
#14 and continue if you are curious how good your
sensitivity can get). If you can not, try to detect water from
bottle #12 (ten times as sensitive as ELISA). Continue until
you reach a bottle you can detect.
Calculate the error for your experiment by assuming you
could be off by as much as 10% when measuring the salt and