Jonathan Gitlin wrote a firsthand account, in Ars Technica, of what he saw and did at the Improbable Research show two weeks ago. The show was part of the AAAS annual meeting. Here’s a short excerpt:
…At this point, forgetting the adage that the journalist should never become part of the story, your author somehow ended up on stage. To provide some context, in 2009, Dr. Eleana Bodnar, a Ukrainian physician, won the Public Health Prize for inventing a bra that can turn into a pair of emergency face masks, one for the wearer of the brassiere and one for a lucky bystander. We had been shown video footage of the 2009 ceremony, with a first amused, then slightly shocked-looking pair of Nobel laureates (Paul Krugman, Economics 2008; Wolfgang Ketterle, Physics, 2001) being used as demonstration models, as Dr. Bodnar removed her invention which she was wearing it at the time, and attached it to their faces. Dr. Bodnar then whipped out another bra, one half of which was then strapped to Orham Parmuk (Literature, 2006).
As you can see from the photograph above, I helped model Dr. Bodnar’s invention, an example of which had been brought along. More uncomfortable than a standard N95 particulate mask, the underwire tends to pinch your face, and the half of the backstrap that belongs to each cup causes a great deal of face-squishing. As an emergency face mask, I could certainly see it being useful for keeping dust out of your lungs, but for a gas attack or airborne virus, you might be taking your life in someone else’s cup….