The worm turns

In the episode of The X Files called "Ice," Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are sent with a small team of scientists to a remote Arctic research station in order to investigate the murder-suicide of its entire crew.  When they get there, they find one survivor -- the station's mascot, a dog, who shows signs of hyperaggressive behavior (obviously) reminiscent of what afflicted the researchers.

They eventually figure out what happened, but not before two of the people accompanying them are dead, and both Mulder and the third scientist are obviously afflicted with the same malady.  In digging up and thawing out permafrost, the researchers had inadvertently reanimated a deep-frozen parasitic nematode that causes drastic behavioral changes, and is transmissible from bites.  They do find a way to get rid of the infection, saving the lives of Mulder, the infected scientist, and (thank heaven) the dog, but the U.S. government destroys the base before any further study of the worm or its origins can be made.

It's a highly effective and extremely creepy episode, doing what The X Files did best -- leaving you at the end with the feeling of, "This ain't actually over."

I was forced unwillingly to recall my watching of "Ice" by two news stories this week.  In the first, scientists have "reawakened" -- deliberately this time -- a nematode that has been frozen for 46,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.

Dubbed Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, it's a previously unknown species.  This doesn't mean it's a truly prehistoric species; Phylum Nematoda is estimated to contain about a million species, of which only thirty thousand have been studied, classified, and named.  So it could well be that Panagrolaimus exists out there somewhere, in active (i.e. unfrozen) ecosystems, and the invertebrate zoologists just hadn't found it yet.

Still, it's hard not to make the alarming comparison to the horrific events in "Ice" (and countless other examples of the "reanimating creatures frozen in the ice" trope in science fiction).  This reaction is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that two-thirds of the nematode species known are harmless to humans, and even the ones that are parasitic usually aren't life-threatening.  There are a few truly awful ones -- which, for the sakes of the more sensitive members of my audience, I'll refrain from giving details about -- but most nematodes are harmless, so chances are Panagrolaimus is as well.

On the other hand, it doesn't mean that thawing frozen stuff out is risk-free, and the problem is, because of climate change, thawing is happening all over the world even without reckless scientists being involved.  The second study, conducted at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, appeared in a paper in PLOS - Computational Biology and described a digital simulation of a partially frozen ecosystem (that contained living microbes in suspended animation).  They looked at how the existing community would be affected by the introduction of the now reawakened species -- and the results were a little alarming.

It has been tempting to think that because the entire ecosystem has changed since the microbes were frozen, if they were reanimated, there'd be no way they could compete with modern species which had evolved to live in those conditions.  In other words, the thawed species would be unable to cope with the new situation and would probably die out rapidly.  In fact, that did happen to some of them -- but in these models, the ancient microbes often survived, and three percent of them became dominant members of the ecosystem.  

One percent actually outcompeted and wiped out modern species.

"Given the sheer abundance of ancient microorganisms regularly released into modern communities," the authors write, "such a low probability of outbreak events still presents substantial risks.  Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change."

Now, keep in mind that this was only a simulation; no actual microbes have been resuscitated and released into the environment.

Yet.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Something new from the "Like We Didn't Already Have Enough To Worry About" department.  Maybe I shouldn't watch The X Files.  How about Doctor Who?  Let's see... how about the episode "Orphan 55"?  *reads episode summary*  "...about a future Earth so devastated by climate change that the remnants of humanity have actually evolved to metabolize carbon dioxide instead of oxygen..."

Or maybe I should just shut off the television and hide under my blankie for the rest of the day.

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The reanimators

An announcement a few weeks ago by microbiologist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University that he and his team had successfully resuscitated a 48,500-year-old virus from the Siberian permafrost brought horrified comments like, "I read this book, and it didn't end well" and "wasn't this an episode of The X Files?  And didn't just about everyone die?"  It didn't help when Claverie's team mentioned that the particular virus they brought back to life belonged to a group called (I shit you not) "pandoraviruses," and the media started referring to them by the nickname "zombie viruses."

Claverie's pandoravirus [Image courtesy of Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie]

The team hastened to reassure everyone that the virus they found is a parasite on amoebas, and poses no threat to humans.  This did little to calm everyone down, because (1) not that many laypeople understand viral host specificity, and (2) shows like The Last of Us, in which a parasitic fungus in insects jumps to human hosts and pretty much wipes out humanity, have a fuckload more resonance in people's minds than some dry scientific paper.

What's scary about Claverie's study, though, isn't what you might think.  First, the good news.  Not only is the virus they found harmless to humans, the team is made up of trained microbiologists who are working under highly controlled sterile conditions.  Despite what the "lab leak" proponents of the origins of COVID-19 would have you believe, the likelihood of an accidental release of a pathogen from a lab is extremely unlikely.  (The overwhelming consensus of scientists is that COVID is zoonotic in origin, and didn't come from a lab leak, accidental or deliberate.)  So the obvious "oh my god what are we doing?" reaction, stemming from a sense that we shouldn't "wake up" a frozen virus because it could get out and wreak havoc, is pretty well unfounded.

What worries me is the reason Claverie and his team are doing the research in the first place.

Permafrost covers almost a quarter of the land mass of the Northern Hemisphere.  A 2021 study found that every gram of Arctic permafrost soil contains between a hundred and a thousand different kinds of microbes, some of which -- like Claverie's pandoravirus -- have been frozen for millennia.  A three-degree Celsius increase in global average temperature could melt over thirty percent of the upper layers of Arctic soil.

So potentially, what Claverie's team did under controlled, isolated conditions could happen out in the open with nothing to keep it in check.

Concern over this isn't just hype.  In 2016, melting permafrost in Siberia thawed out the carcass of a reindeer that had died of anthrax.  Once thawed, the spores were still viable, and by the time the incident had been contained, dozens of people had been hospitalized, one had died, and over two thousand reindeer had been infected.  Anthrax isn't some prehistoric microbe that scientists know nothing about, which actually acted in our favor; once it was identified, doctors knew how to treat it and prevent its further spread.

But what if the thawing frost released something we haven't had exposure to for tens of thousands of years, and that was unknown to science?

"We really don’t know what’s buried up there," said Birgitta Evengård, a microbiologist at Umeå University in Sweden, which in a few words says something that is absolutely terrifying.

So the hysteria over Claverie's reawakening of the "zombie virus" focused on the wrong thing.  The reanimators we should be worried about aren't Claverie and his team; they're us.  There were already a myriad excellent reasons to curb fossil fuel use (hard) and try to rein in climate change, but this study just gave us another one.

As always, the problem isn't the scientists; the scientists are the ones trying to figure all this out in time to prevent a catastrophe.  (And, if I haven't made this point stridently enough already, the scientists have been trying to warn us about the effects of climate change for decades.)  The problem is the fact that politicians, and the voters who elect them, have steadfastly refused to do a damn thing about a problem that we could have addressed years ago and that has so many potential horrible outcomes you'd think any one of them would be sufficient justification for acting.  

So how about we stop worrying about the wrong thing and face the fact that we're the ones who need to change what we're doing?

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