Contacts: Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821

September 27, 2002 UNM BIOLOGY PROFESSOR TO BE FEATURED ON NOVA University of New Mexico Associate Professor Diana Northrup will be featured on the science program NOVA, Tuesday, Oct. 1 at 7 p.m. on KNME-TV. Northrup’s segment, “The Lives of Extremophiles,” will be part of the program “The Mysterious Life of Caves.” The show will also be replayed on Sunday, Oct. 6 at 11 a.m. The program will feature four segments, including Northrup’s, discussing toxic caverns teeming with strange life forms and how caves take shape. Other segments include: “Journey into Lechugilla,” “Jewel of the Underground” and “How Caves Form.” Extremophiles are microbes that thrive in environments where nothing else can says Northrup. “We think we’re superior beings, but these guys are really where it’s at,” says Northup, a microbiologist at UNM and an associate in the University’s Museum of Southwestern Biology. “An extremophile is an organism that lives in conditions that are outside of a normal range. ‘Extremophile’ is a very human-centric term. If you live at pH 0, to us that’s extreme; we couldn’t survive in that. But if you think about it from the microbes’ point of view, it’s just everyday.” Northup and other members of SLIME (Subsurface Life in Mineral Environments), a loose affiliation of cave scientists working on geomicrobiological interactions in caves, don their caving gear and descend into caverns like Lechuguilla and Mexico’s Cueva de Villa Luz (“Cave of the Lighted House”). They go in search of the bacteria that gobbles up hydrogen sulfide gas and other noxious chemicals like we do bread and water. As the story reveals, she and other SLIME members are finding that these bizarre creatures may hold clues not only to the earliest life on Earth but to the possibility of life in outer space. # # #

The University of New Mexico
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