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Thanks! My daughter works with pipettes all day long, and this is fascinating. One of her favorite aphorisms is "Don't lick the science!" and today I learned that apparently we used to lick the science.

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Even today mouth pipettes are still used occasionally (in embryology, for example).

I use a mouth pipette (really just a small piece of glass and some rubber tubing with a filter to transfer tardigrades to my microscope slide. This was recommended to me by a tardigrade expert. I had previously used bulb for large glass pipette (my high school lab had a big sign "DO NOT PIPETTE BY MOUTH") and micropipettes for decades, and I was blown away with the level of control you get from mouth pipetting. I'm not that bothered by inhaling some tardigrades.

But being lazy one of my side projects is to make an automatical tardigrade pipettor (ML-based with motors and stuff).

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