Ancient Antarctic Bacteria Revived

Danny Rathjens writes "Frozen bacteria from Antarctica, estimated to be between five to eight million years old, were brought back to life simply by warming them up! NASA folks also participated since they think this can give them better clues on where to look for life on Mars."

Comments

Before opening, please see

[Alrescha]

"The Andromeda Strain", by Michael Crichton, (c) 1969

A.

Really Grave Responsibility Here

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

No, I did not RTFA, but I hope these guys know what the hell they're doing, i.e. I hope to hell [er- heaven] that they're doing this in one of those negative pressure Category III facilities, and that they're all wearing those Intel bunny spacesuits.

While I'll agree that it's a low probability event, if they were to revive some bacteria for which modern organisms lacked an immune response, there could be some serious hell to pay.

I have the same feeling about this idiotic mission to return a mist sample from a [water-based] comet, or to return a soil sample from Mars - while it's a low probability event, the expected consequences from releasing some sort of organic agent into our ecosystem for which we have no immune protection are simply catastrophic.

You may laugh, but hospitals are having a helluva time trying to protect patients from methicillin and vancomycin resistant staphylococcus aureus, and, fifteen years ago, we didn't even know that pseudo-living, pseudo-non-living things like prions even existed.

PS: This little screed is brought to you by a card-carrying, gun-toting, eco-sceptic pillar of what many /.ers would call the right-wing fringe, but folks, we need to be very, very careful with this stuff.

reasonable?

[BigChigger]

Yeah, a chance at new batteries vs. possible plague. Sounds like a reasonable risk to me. At least as long as someone else does the dying.

BC

Re:8 million years is nothing.

[dan dan the dna man]

Erm bacteria don't have mitochondria, they are a feature of some eukaryotic cells not prokaryote ones. The accepted wisdom is that mitochondria are derived from intracellular prokaryote symbiotes.