Jokes aside, this is a serious issues. If we have an engineered bacterium that can eat radiation and chemicals for breakfast, and doesn't need a host, then we need to be darn sure we can stop it in some way.

Also, maybe I'm missing something here. It doesn't matter if you eat radiation, that just spreads it wherever the bacterium goes. The bacterium may be able to break down chemical wastes, but it can't remove the radiation in a radiation leak unless its from Krypton. So the radiation remains anyway.

There is much to worry about. I've seen quite a few movies (from the 50s and 60s) that show what can happen when tiny little critters get zapped with nuclear radiation.

The human race is going to destroy itself eventually, whether it's by Conan or some other means. But I thought with Bush's reelection all the nuclear, I mean nucular, stuff was going to Yucca Mountain, so who needs Conan?

Anyway, the next ice age will wipe out most of us, and the sun's going supernova in about 5 billion years, so who cares.

Aquaman would start sneezing, and then his head would explode. Then Black Manta would come in, hit on his wife, steal his kid, and Superman would fly underwater and totally flip out and kill everything. And then Batman would come up to Superman and he'd be all like "You suck, boy scout" and stab him with a Kryptonite sword. Because Batman's badass.

Leaving aside the comic book perils, D. radiodurans is, like the vast majority of microbes, very unlikely to ever become harmful to humans (less than 3% of cultured bacteria are harmful, and far less than 1% of all bacteria have been cultured; since we tend to be interested in those closest to us, the things we don't know about probably can't hurt us). Extremophiles in general are not likely to deal well with the human body, which to them is an extreme environment. As an example, the bacterium that produces the enzyme used in PCR, the most revolutionary technology in biotech in the last 20 years, is called Thermus aquaticus, and comes from a hot spring. This organism doesn't grow at the temperature of the human body, because 37 degrees (Celsius) is just too cold for it. From the microbes perspective, it's environment is just fine, and not extreme at all, thank you very much.

In case you couldn't tell, I am a microbiologist, and I lurk all over the blogosphere just waiting for the rare moment when my knowledge is useful.

These bugs are fascinating, for all kinds of reasons, including their potential usefulness to clean up toxic waste in radioactive sites, as well as helping biologists understand the mechanisms for protecting a cell against radiation.

As to the fears of super Conan, the DOE people are being good and cautious, and they are right that it is probably out there already. However, lots of genetic engineering for bugs to eat nasty chemicals has already been done, so they should be able to figure out how to do it safely.

One more thing. I'm not sure where the author got his info about riding in on a comet or some such, but my understanding is that the consensus is that radiation resistance is a subset of desiccation tolerance (drying), in terms of the molecular mechanisms.
The link below should take you to a review paper from 2001, if interested
Deinococcus review

If not, here is the citation and abstract. The story is a bit more complicated than I said above, but there is no scientific reason to impute extraordinary origins for this bacterium

Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 2001 Mar;65(1):44-79. Related Articles, Links   Genome of the extremely radiation-resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans viewed from the perspective of comparative genomics. Makarova KS, Aravind L, Wolf YI, Tatusov RL, Minton KW, Koonin EV, Daly MJ. Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4799,USA. The bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans shows remarkable resistance to a range of damage caused by ionizing radiation, desiccation, UV radiation, oxidizing agents, and electrophilic mutagens. D. radiodurans is best known for its extreme resistance to ionizing radiation; not only can it grow continuously in the presence of chronic radiation (6 kilorads/h), but also it can survive acute exposures to gamma radiation exceeding 1,500 kilorads without dying or undergoing induced mutation. These characteristics were the impetus for sequencing the genome of D. radiodurans and the ongoing development of its use for bioremediation of radioactive wastes. Although it is known that these multiple resistance phenotypes stem from efficient DNA repair processes, the mechanisms underlying these extraordinary repair capabilities remain poorly understood. In this work we present an extensive comparative sequence analysis of the Deinococcus genome. Deinococcus is the first representative with a completely sequenced genome from a distinct bacterial lineage of extremophiles, the Thermus-Deinococcus group. Phylogenetic tree analysis, combined with the identification of several synapomorphies between Thermus and Deinococcus, supports the hypothesis that it is an ancient group with no clear affinities to any of the other known bacterial lineages. Distinctive features of the Deinococcus genome as well as features shared with other free-living bacteria were revealed by comparison of its proteome to the collection of clusters of orthologous groups of proteins. Analysis of paralogs in Deinococcus has revealed several unique protein families. In addition, specific expansions of several other families including phosphatases, proteases, acyltransferases, and Nudix family pyrophosphohydrolases were detected. Genes that potentially affect DNA repair and recombination and stress responses were investigated in detail. Some proteins appear to have been horizontally transferred from eukaryotes and are not present in other bacteria. For example, three proteins homologous to plant desiccation resistance proteins were identified, and these are particularly interesting because of the correlation between desiccation and radiation resistance. Compared to other bacteria, the D. radiodurans genome is enriched in repetitive sequences, namely, IS-like transposons and small intergenic repeats. In combination, these observations suggest that several different biological mechanisms contribute to the multiple DNA repair-dependent phenotypes of this organism.

Okay, here's the thing:

1. Superfriends was ruined by the Super Twins (you know, "form of an ice sledge hammer"; "form of a gorilla").

2. The Plague came down from a comet. Wiped out a load of Europeans. So why couldn't the Conan thing have come down from a comet?

Paul -- Thanks for the info, but could you explain one thing ?

'clean up toxic waste in radioactive site's

You mean, clean up chemical waste, right ? It should be impossible for bacteria outside of comic books to clean up actual radiation.

"Wonder Twins," not "Super Twins." But SF was ruined from the get-go by the Twins' predecessors, Wendy, Marvin, and Wonder Dog. Only after they *and* the twins were gone, in the Challenge of the Super-Friends (Legion of Doom) season, did everything come together.

Thank you Jacob, I stand corrected.

Actually, let's face it, Superman could've kicked anyone's butt. It's not like Kryptonite is available at Wal-Mart.

Yes, erg (if that is your real name!), that is exactly what I meant. Sorry if it wasn't quite clear. As you rightly point out, the organism can't increase the rate of radioactive decay, or stop it.

Apparently, Andrew, kryptonite might as well be available at Wal-Mart. In addition to Luthor and Batman having shards, Ra's al Ghul has some red kryptonite lying around, and every other story in the comics has someone finding a shard. Not to mention god-awful Smallville.

::puts comic geek away::

Re: erg

While the bacteria does not remove the underlining toxicity of the radioactive waste, the article does mentioned that they convert the waste into a form less likely to leak, thus easier to handle.

You know, I remember a Justice League comic from the mid-90s in which Zan and Jayna actually returned in dark, grim forms.

When kryptonite is outlawed, only outlaws will have kryptonite. And you can take my kryptonite when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

I remember a Justice League comic from the mid-90s in which Zan and Jayna actually returned in dark, grim forms.

"Justice League Task Force," written by Christopher Priest, who's almost-always terrific and almost never does something really, really wrong.

That was really, really wrong.

They're able to contain it in the lab, so all we need to do if this Super Conan runs ramapant is scoop it up into petri dishes.