It sounds like a science fiction movie, but it’s all real: scientists managed to revive a pair of roundworms that had been buried deep in the Siberian permafrost 46,000 years ago. The roundworms, called nematodes, were thawed in a lab and came alive again, reproduced several generations, and then died.
These nematodes first existed when the woolly mammoths did, managed to survive in the harshest of frozen conditions, and then, from a state of suspended animation, that scientists call cryptobiosis, began life again, crawling about in a lab. A paper on this was published recently in the scientific journal PLOS Genetics. Does this mean, that technically, life can be paused for thousands of years and then restarted? That organisms can exist in a state between life and death indefinitely? If the roundworms came alive again, can other microorganisms and pathogens do that too, especially since the Siberian permafrost is melting, and can these microbes cause new diseases?
Guest: Philipp Schiffer, group leader at the Institute for Zoology at the University of Cologne and one of the senior authors of the study
Host: Zubeda Hamid
Edited by Jude Francis Weston
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