Today's Blind Items - The Fungus

This A- list mostly television actor was part of a real-life scientific breakthrough during his time studying film in college. In high school, he wore sandals everywhere. He brought this habit with him to college, which proved to have unwanted (and fuzzy) results for his feet during one particularly rainy month when he was acting in student short films outdoors almost daily. During this semester, our then-student was also coincidentally taking a biology class to fulfill a general education requirement. His class was swabbing various surfaces and growing whatever they picked up a petri dish. He and a friend thought it'd be funny for them to swab the new growth on his feet (which, at that point, was emanating an odor uncomfortably close to Mimolette). After a few weeks, when his class was supposed to analyze the specimen they grew from their swab, neither him, nor any of his classmates or his professor, could identify what it was. Out of curiosity, his professor sent the specimen to one of the campus's biological research labs, where a team of post-doctoral fellows was able to confirm it as a newly-discovered specimen. Of course, our now-celebrity gave them permission to conduct further research on the previously unknown strain of toenail fungus, which, years later, led to the invention of a new pharmaceutical that's commonly used in otolaryngology centers today. Legend has it that he still has the original sandals that created the medical miracle in the back of his closet to this day.