The finding, published today in the journal Nature, could, if substantiated, radically alter our picture of life's ability to survive. The discovery may add backing to the fringe notion that microbes can survive for the millennia it takes to travel through space - and that life on Earth could have originated elsewhere in the cosmos. While impressed with the implications, however, other scientists remain skeptical, concerned that what Vreeland and Rosenzweig grew in their lab was nothing more than contemporary microbes that got into the sample they were testing. The type of bacteria they found, bacillus, is garden-variety stuff, teeming in ordinary soil. Unlike elephants, say, or sequoias, asexual bacteria aren't born, exactly - they just keep dividing in two, making it almost impossible to take any individual bacterium and pin an age on it.
Bacteria have another advantage when it comes to longevity.
If their ponds dry up or other conditions become too harsh to support life, they can go into a form of suspended animation called a spore. They stop eating and reproducing, dry out and wrap their DNA and other critical parts in a kind of molecular packing material. Scientists believe this is the form the bacteria took in the salt crystal. There have been previous claims for Methuselah-like life spans in the microbial world. The finding was published in the respected journal Science, but biologists remain divided over whether to believe it.