But he's never had to talk with his hands, as he was asked to do
in San Francisco last Saturday during the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Meeting organizers, fearful of rolling blackouts in California's
ongoing energy crisis, asked the scientists to be ready to talk
without the help of PowerPoint presentations, slide projectors,
overheads or any other device requiring electricity. Presumably
that meant overhead lights as well.
"I can't give a talk like this with my hands," Priscu, a
professor of ecology at Montana State University-Bozeman,
protested before leaving for San Francisco.
Indeed, the AAAS annual meeting is one of the nation's largest
scientific gatherings. Nearly 1,000 journalists were expected to
attend the week-long affair, more than any other scientific
meeting, to cover topics ranging from autoimmune disease in women
to the mathematics of Congressional apportionments. Many of the
speakers were invited owing to their novel ideas about science.
Priscu was asked to recap two major discoveries of "life in the
ice" during a session on science at the Earth's poles. The first
discovery came in 1998 when
Priscu's team reported finding microbes thriving six feet deep in
frozen lakes in the Antarctic Dry Valleys.
The second came last
year. Priscu's team found bacteria in an ice core drilled
from deep within the East Antarctic ice sheet above Lake
Vostok. The lake is a subglacial body of water the size of
Lake Ontario. The microbes were trapped in ice about 11,800 feet
below the surface of the ice sheet and about 495 feet above the
lake.
Both discoveries were published in the journal Scienceand
widely reported around the world.
Priscu also hoped to convince scientists that they should revise
their thinking about the boundaries for life on the planet to
include deep ice.
"We strongly believe that microbes live in and under the two- to
four-kilometer thick Antarctic ice sheet and contribute to the
global carbon cycle," Priscu said. "Our next major task is to
prove this."
The work is analogous, Priscu has said, to studies aimed at
discovering life on Mars and Jupiter's icy moon Europa.
Astrobiology, or the search for life on other planets, is a hot
topic now and is driving much of the public interest in
discoveries like the ones in Antarctica, Priscu said, although
that focus is only a small part of his work.
Priscu's hunt for life in Antarctic ice will continue, a job that
includes no shortage of scientific committee assignments. In one,
he will advise the National Academy of Sciences on the
international status of the United States in Antarctica. The U.S.
is one of 26 Antarctic Treaty Nations currently exploring the
bottom-most continent.
In another, he will co-convene an international group of experts
interested in sampling the water from Lake Vostok without
contaminating it--a feat for which the right technology doesn't
yet exist.
Closer to home, Priscu teaches both undergraduate and graduate
students, maintains an active, well-funded laboratory and plays
in a local rock band.
When the responsibilities start to add up, Priscu remembers the
advice of a colleague, shared while the two were working on Lake
Baikal in eastern Siberia some years ago: "You can sleep when you
are dead," the Russian said.
He also could sleep if the lights go out in San Francisco.
by Annette Trinity-Stevens
