Bill Costerton, director of Montana State University's Center for Biofilm Engineering retired in the spring to initiate a new biofilm center. Sultan of slime retires by Jean Arthur Not many Montanans speak Hindustani. Bill Costerton does. He learned the language during a four-year stint as an Episcopal missionary in India. He speaks other languages too, English and French, and as director of Montana State University's Center for Biofilm Engineering, has helped create the vernacular of the burgeoning field of bio-engineering. Soon, Costerton promises, he may be learning "Valley-girl speak" as part of his retirement to California. In Costerton's lexicon, "retirement" is defined as slowing down long enough to establish a new biofilm center at the University of Southern California. Costerton arrived at MSU in 1993 from Calgary, Alberta. His cutting-edge research unveils mysteries of microbial slime. This slime can be an industrial problem as it can disrupt systems ranging from oil pipelines to municipal water supplies and cause problems ranging from simple fouling to severe corrosion. "We are changing what people think about infections from an engineering base," says Costerton, who coined the term "biofilm" to refer to highly structured communities of bacterial cells living cooperatively. He explains that biofilm is bacteria that can adhere to surfaces in wet environments and begin to excrete a slimy, glue-like substance that can anchor the resultant biofilm community to all kinds of material -- metals, plastics, soil particles, medical implant materials and tissue, like plaque on teeth and gunk clogging drains. Costerton discovered that biofilms damage tissues primarily by triggering inflammation. He suggested an innovative approach to treating chronic diseases: use immune modulators instead of antibiotics. He says that antibiotics designed to kill free-floating bacterial cells work poorly against cells growing in slime-enclosed biofilms. MSU's is the largest and most active biofilm center in the world. The center allows multidisciplinary research teams to find solutions for industrially relevant biofilm problems and potential uses for beneficial biofilms in waste disposal and bioremediation. With Costerton at the helm, the center has increased the number of undergraduates working in the center's labs to 40 students. Center researchers will use a recent $3.1-million grant to explore biofilms as potential traps for biological agents that could be used by terrorists. Costerton's biofilm team has discovered that bacteria in biofilms "talk to each other" by means of simple chemical signals. This discovery may allow scientists and doctors to persuade infecting bacteria to turn off toxin production or even abandon their biofilms and leave the body. As Costerton deciphers the language of bacteria, he also leaves a legacy as one of the most published researchers in the world. The Pied Piper of slime represented MSU on a round-the-globe lecture tour, with stops in Chile, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy where he spoke--in English--on biofilms and all the problems they cause.