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Heffner and Morrissey are lab partners in their microbiology class and decided to put the game of beer pong, and the bacterial populations that come along with it, under a microscope for a class experiment.
"Our professor told us in the beginning that he values creativity above all, and there's never been any research done on this before, even though it is a pretty major part of the average college student's life," Morrissey said.
In beer pong - also known as Beirut - two teams stand across from each other at a long table and try to throw ping pong balls into a triangle formation of cups filled partially with beer. Every time a team makes a throw into a cup, it puts them closer to winning the game and the other team has to drink.
Both Heffner and Morrissey said their starting hypothesis was that they were going to find a lot of bacteria in a typical game.
"It was pretty obvious what we were going to find. It's pretty clear that beer pong isn't exactly a clean game, between people drinking out of the same cups, and the ball falling on the floor," Heffner said.
So to test their hypothesis Heffner and Morrissey set up their own game of beer pong, had eight people play for three hours, going through about a 30-pack of beer before ending the night and letting the bacteria settle.
"We used brand-new balls and cups so that nothing would have any sort of bacteria on it before the game," Heffner said.
Heffner and Morrissey returned to the table the next morning to gather their test tubes and observed them under the microscope. Heffner and Morrissey said the results were startling - every single test tube had bacteria in it.
Heffner said that from one night's worth of playing the typical college drinking game, they found high levels of a bacterial family that contains such species as E. coli, pneumonia and salmonella.
