IS THE EARTH DEINOCOCCUS RADIODRANS BACTERIA OF MARTIAN ORIGIN?
Anatoli Pavlov and his colleagues from the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St Petersburg has announced in September 2002 that he concluded that the Deinococcus radiodurans microbe, that can withstand huge doses of radiation, could have evolved this ability on the harsher environment of Mars. The microbe could then have travelled to Earth on pieces of rock that were blasted into space by an impacting asteroid and fell to Earth as meteorites. He said that it would take far longer than life has existed on Earth for the microbe to evolve that ability in Earth’s clement conditions. Deinococcus radiodurans is renowned for its resistance to radiation – it can survive several thousand times the lethal dose for humans. To investigate how the trait might have evolved, his team tried to induce this radioactivity resistance in the well know E. coli bacteria. They blasted E. coli with enough gamma rays to kill 99.9 per cent of them, let the survivors recover, and then repeated the process. Dur
