Word: borucki
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Through a teardrop of ancient amber -- fossilized tree sap as hard as plastic and as translucent as glass -- the scientists beheld their quarry: a small stingless bee that shared the earth with giant mastodons. With sterile instruments and gloved hands, microbiologist Raul Cano and his student Monica Borucki proceeded with an improbable experiment. First they delicately extracted the bee's diminutive digestive tract. Then they placed the tissues in nutrient-rich broth. Within a week the mixture turned cloudy, a sign that bacterial spores, dormant inside the bee for 25 million to 40 million years, had suddenly, miraculously surged back...
...then some. For the stunt pulled off by scientists in Michael Crichton's novel and Steven Spielberg's movie -- retrieving strands of dinosaur DNA from amber, then using it to recreate monsters from the past -- belongs to the realm of fiction. By contrast, the article in which Cano and Borucki describe their achievement appeared last week in the pages of the journal Science. And while the Jurassic Park scientists cloned DNA to re-create approximations of dinosaurs and used frog DNA to fill in the genetic code, Cano's team claims to have revived the exact ancient organism, totally intact...