Archaeologic Armageddon
Are We Asking For It?
From: Ambrovista@aol.com
Archaeologic Armageddon - Are We Asking For It?
By Margareta-Erminia Cassani http://www.moonbowmedia.com
11-20-00
Recently scientists brought back to life a creature older than the
dinosaurs, with an estimated age of 250 million years. The creature was found
in the wall of an air shaft, 1,850 feet below ground level at the U.S.
Department of Energy's nuclear Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New
Mexico. It was lying in suspended animation, encased in a hard spore shell,
floating in a bubble of a brine-like salt-fluid. It was suspected to have
been there more than 250 million years, which would make this unnamed
bacterium the oldest known living thing on the planet.
Dr. Russell Vreeland, a biologist at West Chester University in Pennsylvania
is credited with the find as reported in the scientific journal, Nature.
Previously, the oldest known organism was a bacterium taken from the gut of a
bee that had been trapped in a fossilized tree sap 25 million years ago.
Vreeland's New Mexico bacterium is apparently 10 times older than that.
Vreeland and his Pennsylvania colleague-scientists put the organism in a
nutrient "broth", gave it oxygen, and warmed it. Incredibly, the bacterium,
which had lain dormant through such dramatic Earth changes as the continental
shift and divide, mountain chains being built and destroyed, oceans formed,
and the development of creatures much larger than themselves that stood up
and walked the Earth upright on two legs, woke up after 250 million years,
started eating and multiplied. Simple as that.
Scientists associated with Vreeland's discovery feel that the find will open
a window into the prehistoric world - a world that existed prior to the
dinosaurs - and give us knowledge of what kind of organisms existed then. But
Vreeland's discovery also provides scientists and the rest of us with the
living proof of the tenacity of the bacterial organism, and perhaps other
organisms, to survive "clinical death" by slipping into a state of dormancy
until some time in the future when they might be revived through deliberate,
or unwitting, intervention. The find quickly flings opens a previously locked
door to unknown and uncharted areas wherein the complexity of what life and
death really are must be re- evaluated. If we can revive an organism millions
of years old in a relatively quick and easy manner such as Vreeland and his
colleagues have, what are we visiting upon ourselves in the long run?
Are we bringing back to life, perhaps, a creature that was destined for
extinction because it had killed off all its hosts that it lived and bred
from, and its contribution to the universe had run its course? What would it
mean, then, to introduce into our modern-day existence bacterium from
millions of years ago, organisms that lived, bred, (and we thought died) long
before we ever set foot on the Earth? What disease states do these ancient
organisms carry with them? And are they capable of being killed with our
modern medicine? Are they capable of killing us with a disease process that
we know nothing about and won't have time, perhaps, to figure out? Are we
asking for archaeologic Armageddon when we excavate these ancestors of
bacterium that we, in our over- antibiotic's world, have grown more and more
resistant to? What will happen when one of these dinobacterium are introduced
to and mate with their contemporary offspring whom we have been working
harder and harder lately to eradicate? When they lend their tenacious, long-
surviving, DNA to them in a kind of Jurassic Park syndrome that will produce
a superbug more tenacious, more deadly, more horrific than we could ever
imagine?
With our present-day antibiotics growing weaker and weaker to protect us
against the resurgence of near epidemic levels of bacterial infections, it is
clear that the bacterial organisms we are aware of have outsmarted us and
learned how to mutate themselves into resistant strains. That kind of
intelligence in armies that far outnumber humans on the Earth many times over
is something all of us, should sober at the thought of.
Do we have a right to disinter these creatures from their sleeping places
where Mother Nature long ago placed them, most likely for evolutionary
progress, to boost the ego and career of scientists eager to make a name for
themselves with some extraordinary find? Take the ancient Wooly Mammoth that
not long ago was chiseled from the ancient ice it had occupied for many
millennia. Why? Because a certain French scientist thought it would be "fun"
to reproduce it with modern-day cloning techniques. No specific driving
scientific need or reason to do such a task just because. Bring it back to
life, let it roam an Earth it has no genetic memory of nor place in. And did
any of those scientists consider, I wonder, what that creature had riding
onboard in its hair, under its nails, in its skin, that perhaps woke up and
came to life when its icy tomb melted, like Vreeland's 250 million year-old
bacterium, that has now, perhaps, been released back into a world it was
never meant to occupy as scientists picked and prodded its host with
biopsies for viable DNA cloning material?
We don't know the world where these organisms came from. It is a world that
has been gone for over 250 million years; a world devoid of human life. Do we
really want to revive bacterium, and perhaps an ancient world of heretofore
unknown disease that quite likely could have been responsible for the demise
of other unknown creatures who may have inhabited the Earth long before we
did? Can we afford to so arrogantly second-guess and supersede the intent of
the wisdom of the Universe in terminating the lifespan of one creature so
that another creature may live and make its contribution to the evolutionary
life cycle? And at what price do we do so?
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updated on 07/20/07 05:09 AM