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Meet the Scientist Who Injected Himself With 3.5 Million-Year-Old Bacteria

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: December 21st, 2015, 7:00am UTC

Press2ToContinue writes with this profile of Anatoli Brouchkov, a scientist who isn't afraid to take an extremely hands-on approach to science. Vice reports: "Anatoli Brouchkov is a soft-spoken guy with silver hair, and when he lets out a reserved chuckle, his eyes light up like he was belly laughing. If you met him on the street, you'd never guess that he once injected himself with a 3.5 million-year-old strain of bacteria, just to see what would happen. According to Brouchkov, Bacillus F has a mechanism that has enabled it to survive for so long beneath the ice, and that the same mechanism could be used to extend human life, toomdash;perhaps, one day, forever. In tests, Brouchkov says the bacteria allowed female mice to reproduce at ages far older than typical mice. Fruit flies, he told the Siberian Times, also experienced a 'positive impact' from exposure to the bacteria."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Meet+the+Scientist+Who+Injected+Himself+With+3.5+Million-Year-Old+Bacteria%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1JnLyGA"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F12%2F21%2F0447254%2Fmeet-the-scientist-who-injected-himself-with-35-million-year-old-bacteria%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/12/21/0447254/meet-the-scientist-who-injected-himself-with-35-million-year-old-bacteria?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/12/21/0447254/meet-the-scientist-who-injected-himself-with-35-million-year-old-bacteria?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/WJT4rUSagaE" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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