Military officials regularly run safety tests for on-base Anthrax detectors. Normally, they use "dead" samples of the dangerous bacteria - deactivated by massive doses of radiation, but recently it was discovered there were some live spores within batches of Anthrax shipped by the Pentagon. Flagstaff geneticist Paul Keim suspects the microorganisms might be able to bring themselves back from the dead.
Keim hypothesizes that, "Perhaps in those trillions of spores with their broken DNA, there were a few of them that managed to repair their DNA. Not right away, but perhaps over a matter of storage over weeks, months or even years. Perhaps a very, very small number of those spores resurrect themselves from death and start to grow.
Keim has named his hypothesis the Lazarus Effect. It's a twist on the biblical story of Jesus bringing Lazarus of Bethany back to life. For years, Keim has studied the phenomenon of "recombination", when dormant cells with so-called "broken DNA" begin to repair themselves and regenerate.
Though he's never seen "recombination" happen in spores, Keim now believes it's possible and may explain the presence of live spores in the Pentagon's samples of Anthrax. "There will be evidence about how it works from looking at its DNA," Keim says. "I would expect the Department of Defense to actually be doing whole genome sequencing on these resurrected spores and looking for the scars that might be left in the DNA from the repair process, so we'll see exactly what happened."
Keim says much more research needs to be conducted on his theory of the Lazarus Effect before scientists can truly know what impact the spores might have in nature, in human disease and even in bio-terrorism.
