Word: bacterias
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...mice could not resist infection from bacteria. Their graft-rejection mechanism was severely impaired, and as a result their skins accepted grafts not only from unrelated strains of mice but even from a different species...
...which, untreated, may be handicapping or fatal, said O'Connor. And the scientists are closing in on other disorders suspected of being transmitted by genes, the giant molecules of heredity: diabetes, gout, some forms of mongolism, cretinism, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, the inability to make protective antibodies against bacteria, and many other disorders of the blood, besides obvious physical defects...
Geologists know that the Bad Nauheim brine gets its salt from the thick Kali and Zechstein deposits 40 miles away, so Dombrowski next looked for bacteria in the salt itself. Guarding carefully against contamination by modern bacteria, he dissolved samples of Zechstein salt in sterilized nutrient broth. After a few days, he examined the broth, found it to be teeming with lively bacteria...
Sure that his colleagues would still suspect that ordinary modern bacteria had worked their way into his broth, Dombrowski developed elaborate precautions to keep the invaders out (including germ-killing ultraviolet light, antiseptic solution, and gas flames), repeated a laborious process 180 times. In 86 cases the broth contained a culture of living bacteria which, Dombrowski is sure, could only have come from the ancient salt. Most of the bacteria were strains of Pseudomonas, whose nearest modern relatives live in the intensely salt water of the Dead...
Some bacteriologists may still be skeptical. Bacteria can be enclosed in crystallized salt and stay alive. Only last week bacteria were reported that had lived in Antarctic ice for 44 years, since the Shackelton Expedition of 1917. But living in salt for 180 million years is an unheard-of feat. Dombrowski, nevertheless, has able supporters. Bacteriologist Georg Henneberg, head of Berlin's famed Robert Koch Institute, does not doubt that Dombrowski extracted living bacteria from the interior of solid blocks of Zechstein salt-though there is still a slim possibility that the salt was contaminated relatively recently by bacteria...