Assuming the ampule room sensed an infection, triggering a secure lockdown by closing the (open) door as the infected engineer approached it, then I wonder what else the ampule room is capable of sensing / reacting. Once the head was inside the now locked room, did the room do anything else after the decapitation? Did the room try to perform a self-sanitising operation much like the decontamination box inside the prometheus' med lab, spraying the whole room with some sort of cleansing gas?
And if so, how did those worms get there? Sure, they could have wormed their way in over the centuries. Or maybe the worms were outside, but hitched a ride into the otherwise sterile ampule room via the boots of the prometheus crew when they first entered.
The ampule room does seem to have a certain intelligence about it, judging by the dynamically changing murals, so I can't just imagine the engineer gets decapitated and thats the end of the story. The dead engineer is indeed well preserved according to Shaw's carbon reader, but I wasn't sure whether the head was more preserved inside the ampule room, than the rest of the body outside the ampule room.
According to the holographic recording, the engineer lags behind the rest of group as they run away, then it stumbles, falls to the knees, and gets decapitated by the sheer force of the door closing to the ampule room.
Now - that the door was normally left in the "open" position is a bit puzzling, Automated doors as we know them, open on approach, rather than close on approach. Seems a bit pointless to go to the bother of installing a door at all, if its habitually left in the open position. Be that whether they intended the ampule room more as a sacred (cherished) temple, or as a secure and controlled environment for bio-experiments.
Of course, it could also be argued the engineer was attempting to seek refuge inside the ampule room, but he only made it as far as the door before the infection stopped him.
If the engineer was trying to attempt suicide to prevent further spread of infection, from what we know, lockable doors in the pyramid generally seem to be operated from above (human) shoulder height via a control panel to the right of the door. So unless there was another means for the engineer being able to do this from the kneeling-down position a la open sesame / close sesame command, I'm wondering how automated the ampule room really was...
Anyway, any thoughts on the reactive capabilities of the ampule room?