A few years before Norm Pace revolutionized the study of life on Earth, he almost lost his own life.

He’s best known as a microbiologist, but he’s also a die-hard spelunker. In the 1970s, he and a group of friends set out to explore a Mexican cave called Sumidero Yochib. It sits at the bottom of a massive sinkhole that doubles as a large drain; when it rains, a hundred square miles of water funnel into the entrance, turning it into a raging torrent. These waterfalls, combined with almost a dozen sheer drops, make Yochib one of the most dangerous caves in the world.

When Pace started his career, scientists who studied bacteria and other microbes did so by growing them in flasks and beakers, but only a tiny fraction of these organisms will thrive in a laboratory.

“When I started as a microbiologist, [we] just accepted that we had no idea of what 99.9 percent of microbes in the environment did, and focused our energies on working out what the 0.1 percent did,” says Hazel Barton, a microbiologist at the University of Akron and one of Pace’s protégés.

“If you look at textbooks, it’s not uncommon for the historical section to say that the golden age of microbiology ran from 1900 to 1950, when new antibiotics were discovered,” says Pace. “We haven’t begun to touch the golden age of microbiology. It’s ahead of us.” Since his seminal work, Pace has studied the microbes of many other inhospitable environments, including caves, hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and the New York subway. He has also turned his attention to more everyday ecosystems, like showerheads and offices.

Pace and his colleagues have also helped to work out what all these unknown microbes actually do. They developed ways of sequencing not just rRNA, but every microbial gene in a sample. That told them not just who was present, but what these microbes were capable of.

Read the source article at The Atlantic