If you enjoyed this small story, then I recommend:

Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century 1996 by Stephen Fenichell

which is a readable history of the field, from parkesine and bakelite onward and it discusses the breathable, and non-breathable composites and uses of plastics as liners, as in this instance.

So the genius part is that... it's made out of polyethylene? I spent seemingly forever skipping through this article to find paragraphs of text drowning in useless giant images, and then the text that I did find was seriously overwrought, with hardly any of it seeming to actually say anything insightful.

I had a brief stint at the Smithsonian conservation analytical laboratory. We were studying the feasibility of extracting ancient dna from Peruvian mummies (yes, it is possible). My boss was joking about one of her competitors/colleagues at another university, a professor that collected barf bags. She turned the news on one day only to see him on (probably cnn?) for having the largest barf bag collection in the world.

This was way back when fame wasn’t the ultimate goal and some things could actually hurt your image.

I keep a barf bag in my backpack at all times. I have never needed it, but it's one of those things that's good to be prepared with.