The first bioluminescent mammals were a series of glowing mice created in 1995 by Stanford University researcher Christopher Contag and co-workers, extracting genes responsible for bioluminescence from various glowing bacteria and inserting them into Salmonella bacteria, which causes severe food poisoning. These now-glowing Salmonella bacteria, having adopted the bioluminescence genes as their own and reproducing with these genes retained from generation to generation, were then fed to some mice, and Contag and his team were able to watch directly how the Salmonella infection took hold inside these mice simply by observing the passage of the glow. Moreover, they could diminish the glow by feeding the mice with antibiotics, which reduced the infection.