One hardy little worm

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a cellular and molecular biologist. My specific area of research is in the cellular biology of aging – why do cells (and whole organisms) get old and die? To do this research, my colleagues and I use a model organism called Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans, for short). C. elegans is a small roundworm that lives in the soil of temperate environments throughout the world. It was first developed for use in biological research in the 1970s, and has become a premier organism for studying development, neurobiology and aging. C. elegans is a cool animal with lots of really neat features (at least, neat to a biologist), but I’m not going to go into a great amount of detail about the organism itself right now. Instead, I want to write about how amazingly sturdy these worms are.

A group of C. elegans was on board the space shuttle Columbia when it exploded upon re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere on February 1, 2003. A week later, their containers were found amidst the vast amounts of debris left over from the explosion. Three months later, the containers were opened. And to everyone’s amazement, the worms were still alive.

The Columbia performed approximately 60 different experiments while it was in space. Many of those experiments involved various animals – including worms, insects, spiders, fish, bees and silk worms. Worms had been sent into space several times before this, to study the effects of space radiation and microgravity. This time, the experiment was very simple – would the worms survive well in space if fed a synthetic diet instead of its usual bacteria? Had the Columbia survived its re-entry, it’s doubtful whether the results of the experiment would have even made the mainstream media. However, as we know, the Columbia did not survive. And everything of board died – except for the worms.

The worms were growing on Petri dishes, which were enclosed within aluminum containers, which were themselves enclosed in a locker around the mid-deck of the shuttle. The locker itself was discovered, and still contained some moss used in another experiment onboard the space shuttle. (However, the moss had been killed with a preservative before re-entry.) The 5 canisters each contained 6 to 8 petri dishes. Only 1 of the dishes had melted, and those worms died. But the others were still alive. Some of them had gone into a super-stress resistant hibernation mode, which has long been known to allow them to live under conditions of high heat, low food, and extreme stress. But others hadn’t even gone into the hibernation mode – they were still crawling and active.

Even in the midst of the Columbia disaster, many scientists greeted the news of the worm’s survival as groundbreaking. It has been used as an argument for the notion that life on earth may have come here on a meteor from elsewhere in the galaxy. After all, if a worm could survive a gigantic explosion upon coming into the atmosphere, why couldn’t sturdy bacteria do it if it was embedded within a meteor? Now, I don’t want to weigh in on that particular topic. But I do think it incredible that something – anything – could have survived a disastrous re-entry and explosion the way that these worms did.

Of course, it would have been great if we had never had to learn this lesson – because then we wouldn’t have lost the Columbia.