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 to life.
"As exciting as Jurassic Park," ventures Cano -- and maybe 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. The reactions from other scientists ranged from skepticism to astonishment and delight. "Wow!" exclaimed University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski. "It's marvelous to be able to reconstitute an organism from that long ago."
Already this bacterial Rip Van Winkle is being touted as a trailblazer for a new industry. Ambergene Corp. of San Carlos, California, a small biotech firm Cano helped start, claims to have used similar techniques to reanimate nearly 1,500 prehistoric microorganisms ranging from bacteria to yeast. Among the compounds these tiny creatures produce, Cano and his partners hope to identify unique drugs, industrial enzymes and natural pesticides. The company is already filing for patents on promising microbes.
The way Cano tells it, he did not set out to raise the dead but rather to study symbiosis, the mutually beneficial relationship that exists between complex organisms and their microbial fellow travelers. To that end, Cano, chairman of the microbiology department at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, began working with insects fossilized in ancient amber and the microbes, presumably long dead, that their bodies contained. The problem, noted an exasperated Cano, was that live bacterial colonies kept popping up in the samples. And, oddly enough, the super-clean procedures followed by his laboratory appeared powerless to prevent the unwelcome intrusions.
Gradually an exciting hypothesis took shape. "I began to wonder," says Cano, "if I was not awakening ancient organisms that had been entombed in amber for millions of years." He knew scientists had revived hardy bacterial spores that were hundreds of years old, but they were youngsters compared with his alleged ancients.