After years of studying the strange microorganisms that grow at boiling point in the water surrounding volcanic vents, with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), even the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), John Reeve finds himself suddenly an expert on life in the ice, traveling to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena and to Harvard University for meetings of the world's top scientists involved in planning a space mission to Jupiter's frozen moon, Europa.

"We just began to work on ice, but somehow we seem to have become the world's experts on microbial survival in ice," Reeve says and adds with a laugh, "Of course, you get to be the world's expert quickly when you're the only research group. The competition is not what we'd call intense!"

When the story about evidence for life in a Martian meteorite hit the popular press about three years ago, it fueled a resurgence of interest in space biology, and it seemed natural for Reeve, who had a highly-successful extremophile track record, to think about the potential of life at the other end of the thermometer.

Although people may not get excited about discoveries of distant nebula, life on Mars is another matter. The bonus, or the icing on the space cake for Reeve, was that the meteorite, which clearly came from Mars, had fossils that looked like fossils of microorganisms. The National Science Foundation (NSF) took this very seriously, and began an immediate evaluation of research into the microbiology of non-standard environments to determine the extremes of life on earth. "If we propose that there might be life on other planets, we ought to have some feel for the extremes of life here on earth," Reeve says.

Japan and the European Common Market countries have long supported research programs that study extreme microbiology, funding projects that focus on the possibility of using these organisms for industrial processes. "Chemical reactions go faster at high temperatures and Industry much prefers fast in product production," Reeve explains. "It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to say that if we focus on organisms that grow at high temperatures, and live in acidic, salty environments-we may discover biological catalysts that can work under industrial conditions; this would be a real boost to industries that produce and use bulk chemicals."

The result of the NSF scrutiny was a new program, called "Life in Extreme Environments," or LEXEN. Reeve's high temperature work was already funded by NIH, so Reeve started discussions with Lonny and Ellen Thompson at the Byrd Polar Institute, which has stockpiles of ice cores from all over the world used to document climate change over past eons.

"I asked if they ever investigated the survival of anything in this ice-the answer was, 'No,' but they knew just from looking that there were pollen grains, bits of leaves, and occasionally insects, but they had never asked the question of whether they could revive anything," Reeve says. He and the Thompsons got busy writing a grant. The rest, is, as they say-history.

They got the grant and with the help of the Byrd Polar Institute's Victor Zagorodnov, they built a machine that samples the inside of the ice core-it melts the inside of the core without melting the outside. Brent Christner, a graduate student in Reeve's laboratory, got busy resuscitating microorganisms and now has two years of experience characterizing organisms from ices of different ages and geographical origins.

"Are we most interested in investigating the microorganisms to see why they survived-do they have some particular properties that make them resistant to freezing and thawing? Or should we focus on the ecology-who's there, how many, and how they have changed over time," Reeve asks.

"We assume that they're there in the first place by accident, caught by their attraction to a snowflake while they were floating around in the sky-a rather poetic notion-and were inherently resistant to drying and to radiation. But we don't really know yet if they're anymore resistant to these conditions than any other microorganisms," Reeve says.

"The project is at a stage now where we have to decide whether to focus on characterizing the organisms already isolated, or continue to isolate more and more different examples."

Meanwhile, NASA is heading back to space to look for signs of life, and plans to send a sampler to Mars in 2005; with a research facility being built at JPL to investigate returned Martian soil. The next step is to send a lander to Europa, which seems to be covered in ice. "We're not sure how much ice-it might be a mile or a hundred miles thick, with a liquid water ocean below," Reeve says. "Being involved in the Europa planning mission is fun-although we have no idea of what will come out of it," Reeve says. "But from the logistics point of view, the experiments to fly must be chosen very soon. NASA needs a payload description by 2003 to launch in 2008 and arrive around 2012-so we're already close to the point where there is no chance for a change of mind on what experiments to send."

From Reeve's perspective, his new status as a "Life-in-Ice" expert, opens interesting doors and philosophical discussions, including the concept of planning experiments that won't generate results until years after he's retired. "There's a human need to want to know what's out there. Some say that if we were to find life some where other than Earth, it would be the single biggest event in human history," Reeve says.

Stay tuned for 21st Century science!