Great scientists become immortalized in various ways.

Some through names for obscure units of measurement (à la Hertz, Faraday and Curie). Others in elements on the periodic table (Mendeleev, Seaborg, Bohr, among many others). A few become household names symbolizing genius — like Newton in centuries past and nowadays, Einstein. But only one has been honored on millions and millions of cartons of milk: the French chemist, biologist and evangelist for experimental science Louis Pasteur.

Pasteur was born 200 years ago this December, the most significant scientist birthday bicentennial since Charles Darwin’s in 2009. And Pasteur ranked behind only Darwin among the most exceptional biological scientists of the 19th century.

Pasteur not only made milk safe to drink, but also rescued the beer and wine industry. He established the germ theory of disease, saved the French silkworm population, confronted the scourges of anthrax and rabies, and transformed the curiosity of vaccination against smallpox into a general strategy for treating and preventing human diseases. He invented microbiology and established the foundations for immunology.
Had he been alive after 1901, when Nobel Prizes were first awarded, he would have deserved one every year for a decade. No other single scientist demonstrated more dramatically the benefit of science for humankind.

He was not, however, exactly a saint. A Pasteur biographer, Hilaire Cuny, called him “a mass of contradictions.” Pasteur was ambitious and opportunistic, sometimes arrogant and narrow-minded, immodest, undiplomatic and uncompromising. In the scientific controversies he engaged in (and there were many), he was pugnacious and belligerent. He did not suffer criticism silently and was often acerbic in his responses. To his laboratory assistants, he was demanding, dictatorial and aloof. Despite his revolutionary spirit in pursuing science, in political and social matters, he was conformist and deferential to authority.

And yet he was a tireless worker, motivated by service to humankind, faithful to his family and unwaveringly honest. He was devoted to truth, and therefore also to science.
In his youth, Pasteur did not especially excel as a student. His interests inclined toward art rather than science, and he did display exceptional skill at drawing and painting. But in light of career considerations (his father wanted him to be a scholar), Pasteur abandoned art for science and so applied to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris for advanced education. He finished 15th in the competitive entrance examination, good enough to secure admission. But not good enough for Pasteur. He spent another year on further studies emphasizing physical sciences and then took the École Normale exam again, finishing fourth. That was good enough, and he entered the school in 1843. There he earned his doctoral degree, in physics and chemistry, in 1847.

Among his special interests at the École Normale was crystallography. In particular he was drawn to investigate tartaric acid. It’s a chemical found in grapes responsible for tartar, a potassium compound that collects on the surfaces of wine vats. Scientists had recently discovered that tartaric acid possesses the intriguing power of twisting light — that is, rotating the orientation of light waves’ vibrations. In light that has been polarized (by passing it through certain crystals, filters or some sunglasses), the waves are all aligned in a single plane. Light passing through a tartaric acid solution along one plane emerges in a different plane.

Even more mysteriously, another acid (paratartaric acid, or racemic acid), with the exact same chemical composition as tartaric acid, did not twist light at all. Pasteur found that suspicious. He began a laborious study of the crystals of salts derived from the two acids. He discovered that racemic acid crystals could be sorted into two asymmetric mirror-image shapes, like pairs of right-handed and left-handed gloves. All the tartaric acid crystals, on the other hand, had shapes with identical asymmetry, analogous to gloves that were all right-handed.
Pasteur deduced that the asymmetry in the crystals reflected the asymmetric arrangement of atoms in their constituent molecules. Tartaric acid twisted light because of the asymmetry of its molecules, while in racemic acid, the two opposite shapes canceled out each other’s twisting effects.

Pasteur built the rest of his career on this discovery. His research on tartaric acid and wine led eventually to profound realizations about the relationship between microbes and human disease. Before Pasteur, most experts asserted that fermentation was a natural nonbiological chemical process. Yeast, a necessary ingredient in the fermenting fluid, was supposedly a lifeless chemical acting as a catalyst. Pasteur’s experiments showed yeast to be alive, a peculiar kind of “small plant” (now known to be a fungus) that caused fermentation by biological activity.

Pasteur demonstrated that, in the absence of air, yeast acquired oxygen from sugar, converting the sugar to alcohol in the process. “Fermentation by yeast,” he wrote, is “the direct consequence of the processes of nutrition,” a property of a “minute cellular plant … performing its respiratory functions.” Or more succinctly, he proclaimed that “fermentation … is life without air.” (Later scientists found that yeast accomplished fermentation by emitting enzymes that catalyzed the reaction.)

Pasteur also noticed that additional microorganisms present during fermentation could be responsible for the process going awry, a problem threatening the viability of French winemaking and beer brewing. He solved that problem by developing a method of heating that eliminated the bad microorganisms while preserving the quality of the beverages. This method, called “pasteurization,” was later applied to milk, eliminating the threat of illness from drinking milk contaminated by virulent microorganisms. Pasteurization became standard public health practice in the 20th century.

Incorporating additional insights from studies of other forms of fermentation, Pasteur summarized his work on microbial life in a famous paper published in 1857. “This paper can truly be regarded as the beginning of scientific microbiology,” wrote the distinguished microbiologist René Dubos, who called it “one of the most important landmarks of biochemical and biological sciences.”

The germ theory of disease is born
Pasteur’s investigations of the growth of microorganisms in fermentation collided with another prominent scientific issue: the possibility of spontaneous generation of life. Popular opinion even among many scientists held that microbial life self-generated under the proper conditions (spoiled meat, for example). Demonstrations by the 17th century Italian scientist Francesco Redi challenged that belief, but the case against spontaneous generation was not airtight.
In the early 1860s Pasteur undertook a series of experiments that should have left no doubt that spontaneous generation, under conditions encountered on Earth today, was an illusion. Yet he was nevertheless accosted by critics, such as the French biologist Charles-Philippe Robin, to whom he returned verbal fire. “We trust that the day will come when M. Robin will … acknowledge that he has been in error on the subject of the doctrine of spontaneous generation, which he continues to affirm, without adducing any direct proofs in support of it,” Pasteur remarked.

It was his work on spontaneous generation that led Pasteur directly to the development of the germ theory of disease.

For centuries people had suspected that some diseases must be transmitted from person to person by close contact. But determining exactly how that happened seemed beyond the scope of scientific capabilities. Pasteur, having discerned the role of germs in fermentation, saw instantly that something similar to what made wine go bad might also harm human health.

After disproving spontaneous generation, he realized that there must exist “transmissible, contagious, infectious diseases of which the cause lies essentially and solely in the presence of microscopic organisms.” For some diseases, at least, it was necessary to abandon “the idea of … an infectious element suddenly originating in the bodies of men or animals.” Opinions to the contrary, he wrote, gave rise “to the gratuitous hypothesis of spontaneous generation” and were “fatal to medical progress.”

His first foray into applying the germ theory of disease came during the late 1860s in response to a decline in French silk production because of diseases afflicting silkworms. After success in tackling the silkworms’ maladies, he turned to anthrax, a terrible illness for cattle and humans alike. Many medical experts had long suspected that some form of bacteria caused anthrax, but it was Pasteur’s series of experiments that isolated the responsible microorganism, verifying the germ theory beyond doubt. (Similar work by Robert Koch in Germany around the same time provided further confirmation.)

Understanding anthrax’s cause led to the search for a way to prevent it. In this case, a fortuitous delay in Pasteur’s experiments with cholera in chickens produced a fortunate surprise. In the spring of 1879 he had planned to inject chickens with cholera bacteria he had cultured, but he didn’t get around to it until after his summer vacation. When he injected his chickens in the fall, they unexpectedly failed to get sick. So Pasteur prepared a fresh bacterial culture and brought in a new batch of chickens.

When both the new chickens and the previous batch were given the fresh bacteria, the new ones all died, while nearly all of the original chickens still remained healthy. And so, Pasteur realized, the original culture had weakened in potency over the summer and was unable to cause disease, while the new, obviously potent culture did not harm the chickens previously exposed to the weaker culture. “These animals have been vaccinated,” he declared.

Vaccination, of course, had been invented eight decades earlier, when British physician Edward Jenner protected people from smallpox by first exposing them to cowpox, a similar disease acquired from cows. (Vaccination comes from cowpox’s medical name, vaccinia, from vacca, Latin for cow.) Pasteur realized that the chickens surprisingly displayed a similar instance of vaccination because he was aware of Jenner’s discovery. “Chance favors the prepared mind,” Pasteur was famous for saying.

Because of his work on the germ theory of disease, Pasteur’s mind was prepared to grasp the key role of microbes in the prevention of smallpox, something Jenner could not have known. And Pasteur instantly saw that the specific idea of vaccination for smallpox could be generalized to other diseases. “Instead of depending on the chance finding of naturally occurring immunizing agents, as cowpox was for smallpox,” Dubos observed, “it should be possible to produce vaccines at will in the laboratory.”

Pasteur cultured the anthrax microbe and weakened it for tests in farm animals. Success in such tests not only affirmed the correctness of the germ theory of disease, but also allowed it to gain a foothold in devising new medical practices.

Later Pasteur confronted an even more difficult microscopic foe, the virus that causes rabies. He had begun intense experiments on rabies, a horrifying disease that’s almost always fatal, caused usually by the bites of rabid dogs or other animals. His experiments failed to find any bacterial cause for rabies, leading him to realize that it must be the result of some agent too small to see with his microscope. He could not grow cultures in lab dishes of what he could not see. So instead he decided to grow the disease-causing agent in living tissue — the spinal cords of rabbits. He used dried-out strips of spinal cord from infected rabbits to vaccinate other animals that then survived rabies injections.

Pasteur hesitated to test his rabies treatment on humans. Still, in 1885 when a mother brought to his lab a 9-year-old boy who had been badly bitten by a rabid dog, Pasteur agreed to administer the new vaccine. After a series of injections, the boy recovered fully. Soon more requests came for the rabies vaccine, and by early the next year over 300 rabies patients had received the vaccine and survived, with only one death among them.

Popularly hailed as a hero, Pasteur was also vilified by some hostile doctors, who considered him an uneducated interloper in medicine. Vaccine opponents complained that his vaccine was an untested method that might itself cause death. But of course, critics had also rejected Pasteur’s view of fermentation, the germ theory of disease and his disproof of spontaneous generation.
Pasteur stood his ground and eventually prevailed (although he did not turn out to be right about everything). His attitude and legacy of accomplishments inspired 20th century scientists to develop vaccines for more than a dozen deadly diseases. Still more diseases succumbed to antibiotics, following the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming — who declared, “Without Pasteur I would have been nothing.”

Even in Pasteur’s own lifetime, thanks to his defeat of rabies, his public reputation was that of a genius.

Pasteur’s scientific legacy
As geniuses go, Pasteur was the opposite of Einstein. To get inspiration for his theories, Einstein imagined riding aside a light beam or daydreamed about falling off a ladder. Pasteur stuck to experiments. He typically initiated his experiments with a suspected result in mind, but he was scrupulous in verifying the conclusions he drew from them. Preconceived ideas, he said, can guide the experimenter’s interrogation of nature but must be abandoned in light of contrary evidence. “The greatest derangement of the mind,” he declared, “is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.”

So even when Pasteur was sure his view was correct, he insisted on absolute proof, conducting many experiments over and over with variations designed to rule out all but the true interpretation.

“If Pasteur was a genius, it was not through ethereal subtlety of mind,” wrote Pasteur scholar Gerald Geison. Rather, he exhibited “clear-headedness, extraordinary experimental skill and tenacity — almost obstinacy — of purpose.”
His tenacity, or obstinacy, helped him persevere through several personal tragedies, such as the deaths of three of his daughters, in 1859, 1865 and 1866. And then in 1868 he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that left him paralyzed on his left side. But that did not slow his pace or impair continuing his investigations.

“Whatever the circumstances in which he had to work, he never submitted to them, but instead molded them to the demands of his imagination and his will,” Dubos wrote. “He was probably the most dedicated servant that science ever had.”

To the end of his life, Pasteur remained dedicated to science and the scientific method, stressing the importance of experimental science for the benefit of society. Laboratories are “sacred institutions,” he asserted. “Demand that they be multiplied and adorned; they are the temples of wealth and of the future.”

Three years before his death in 1895, Pasteur further extolled the value of science and asserted his optimism that the scientific spirit would prevail. In an address, delivered for him by his son, at a ceremony at the Sorbonne in Paris, he expressed his “invincible belief … that science and peace will triumph over ignorance and war, that nations will unite, not to destroy, but to build, and that the future will belong to those who will have done most for suffering humanity.”
Two hundred years after his birth, ignorance and war remain perniciously prominent, as ineradicable as the microbes that continue to threaten public health, with the virus causing COVID-19 the latest conspicuous example. Vaccines, though, have substantially reduced the risks from COVID-19, extending the record of successful vaccines that have already tamed not only smallpox and rabies, but also polio, measles and a host of other once deadly maladies.

Yet even though vaccines have saved countless millions of lives, some politicians and so-called scientists who deny or ignore overwhelming evidence continue to condemn vaccines as more dangerous than the diseases they prevent. True, some vaccines can induce bad reactions, even fatal in a few cases out of millions of vaccinations. But shunning vaccines today, as advocated in artificially amplified social media outrage, is like refusing to eat because some people choke to death on sandwiches.

Today, Pasteur would be vilified just as he was in his own time, probably by some people who don’t even realize that they can safely drink milk because of him. Nobody knows exactly what Pasteur would say to these people now. But it’s certain that he would stand up for truth and science, and would be damn sure to tell everybody to get vaccinated.

Brenda Garstone is on the hunt for her heritage.

Parts of her cultural inheritance are scattered across the Tanami desert in northwestern Australia, where dozens of ancient boab trees are engraved with Aboriginal designs. These tree carvings — called dendroglyphs — could be hundreds or even thousands of years old, yet have received almost no attention from western researchers.

That is slowly starting to change. In the winter of 2021, Garstone — who is Jaru, an Aboriginal group from the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia — teamed up with archaeologists to find and document some of these carvings.

For Garstone, the expedition was a bid to piece back together the disparate parts of her identity. These pieces were scattered 70 years ago when Garstone’s mother and three siblings were among the estimated 100,000 Aboriginal children taken from their families by the Australian government. Like many others, the siblings were sent to live at a Christian mission thousands of kilometers from home. It would take decades of effort and a series of unconnected events — including the gift of an heirloom and a researcher’s quest to find out what happened to a missing 19th century European naturalist — for Garstone’s family to reclaim its birthright.
When the siblings returned to their mother’s homeland as teenagers, their extended family gave Garstone’s aunt, Anne Rivers, a coolamon, a type of shallow dish, decorated with two bottle trees, or boabs. Rivers, who was only 2 months old when she was sent away, was told that the trees were a part of her mother’s Dreaming, the cultural story that connected her and her family to the land.

Now, in a study published October 11 in Antiquity, researchers have meticulously described 12 boabs with dendroglyphs in the Tanami desert that have links to Jaru culture. And just in time: The clock is ticking for these ancient engravings as their host trees succumb to the ravages of time and growing pressure from livestock and possibly climate change.

The race to document these engravings before it’s too late isn’t just a matter of studying an ancient art form. It’s also a matter of healing the wounds inflicted by policies intended to erase the connection between Garstone’s family and the land.

“To find evidence that ties us to the land has been amazing,” she says. “The puzzle we’ve been trying to piece together is now complete.”

An outback archive
Australian boabs (Adansonia gregorii) proved pivotal to this project. Found in the northwestern corner of Australia, boabs are a species of tree easily recognizable by their massive trunks and iconic bottle shape.
Anthropologists have written about the existence of trees carved with Aboriginal symbols in Australia since the early 1900s. These records indicate that people were continuously carving and recarving some trees until at least the 1960s. But compared with other forms of Aboriginal art — such as the visually spectacular paintings also found in the area (SN: 2/5/20) — “there does not appear to be a wide general awareness of this art form,” says Moya Smith, curator of anthropology and archaeology at the Western Australia Museum in Perth, who was not involved with the study.

Darrell Lewis has come across his share of carved boabs. The historian and archaeologist now at the University of New England in Adelaide has worked in the Northern Territory for half a century. Lewis has spotted engravings made by cattle drovers, World War II soldiers and Aboriginal peoples. He calls this eclectic bag of engravings “the outback archive” — a physical testament to the people who have made this rugged part of Australia their home.

In 2008, Lewis was searching the Tanami Desert for what he hoped would be his biggest addition to the archive. He’d heard rumors that a cattle drover working in the area a century earlier had found a firearm stashed in a boab marked with the letter “L.” A roughly cast brass plate from the firearm — later bought by the National Museum of Australia — was stamped with the name of the famed German naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, who disappeared in 1848 while traveling across western Australia.

The Tanami is generally considered to be outside the boab’s natural range. So in 2007, Lewis rented a helicopter and crisscrossed the desert in search of the Tanami’s secret stash of boabs. His flyovers revealed roughly 280 centuries-old boabs and hundreds of younger trees scattered across the desert.

“Nobody, not even locals, really knew there were any boabs out there,” he recalls.
His 2008 ground expedition to find the elusive “L” came up empty-handed. But the search did uncover dozens of boabs marked with dendroglyphs.

In a report for the National Museum of Australia, which had hired him to search for the “L” carving, Lewis recorded the location of these trees. That information sat untouched for years until one day, it fell into the hands of Sue O’Connor, an archaeologist at Australian National University in Canberra.

Crumble into dust
In 2018, O’Connor was part of a group of archaeologists who were growing increasingly concerned about the survival of boabs. That year, scientists studying baobabs in Africa — a close relative of boabs — noticed that some of the older trees were dying out at a surprisingly high rate, potentially due to climate change (SN: 6/18/18).

The news alarmed O’Connor. Dendroglyphs are often engraved on the largest and oldest boabs. While nobody knowns exactly how old these trees can get, researchers suspect that their lifetimes could be comparable to their African cousins, which can live up to 2,000 years.

When these long-lived trees do die, they pull a disappearing act. Unlike other trees, whose wood can be preserved for hundreds of years after death, boabs have a moist and fibrous interior that can quickly disintegrate. Lewis has witnessed boabs crumble into the dust a couple of years after being struck by lightning.

“You would never know there’d been a tree there,” he says.

Whether Australian boabs are threatened by climate change is unclear. But the trees are coming under attack from livestock, which peel back boabs’ bark to get to the wet interior. “We put all this together and thought we better try and locate some of the carvings because they probably won’t be there in a few years,” says O’Connor.

Lewis’ report provided a good jumping-off point for this work. So O’Connor reached out to the historian and suggested they collaborate.

Around that same time, Garstone was four years into her own research into her family’s heritage. The long and meandering search led her to a small museum that a friend of Lewis’ happened to run. When Garstone mentioned she was from Halls Creek — a town near where Lewis did his fieldwork in 2008 — the curator told her about the carved boabs.

“I was like, ‘What? That’s a part of our Dreaming!’” she recalls.
Dreamings are a western term used to refer to the vast diversity of stories that — among other things — recount how spiritual beings formed the landscape. Dreaming stories also pass down knowledge and inform rules of behavior and social interaction.

Garstone knew from the oral history passed down through her family that her grandmother had ties to the Bottle Tree Dreaming, as indicated by the trees painted on her aunt’s coolamon. The Bottle Tree Dreaming is one of the eastern-most manifestations of the Lingka Dreaming track (Lingka is the Jaru word for the King Brown Snake). This path runs for thousands of kilometers from the western coast of Australia and into the neighboring Northern Territory, marking Lingka’s journey across the landscape and forming a byway for people to travel across the country.

Eager to confirm that the boabs were a part of this Dreaming, Garstone, along with her mother, aunt and a scattering of other family members, joined the archaeologists on their mission to rediscover the boabs.

Into the Tanami
On a winter day in 2021, the group set out from the town of Halls Creek and set up camp on a remote pastoral station mainly populated by cattle and feral camels. Every day, the team climbed into all-wheel-drive vehicles and headed out to the last known location of the engraved boabs.

It was hard work. The crew often drove hours to the supposed position of a boab, only to have to stand on top of the vehicles and scan for trees in the distance. What’s more, wooden stakes sticking out of the ground constantly shredded the vehicles’ tires. “We were out there for eight or 10 days,” says O’Connor. “It felt longer.”

The expedition was cut short when they ran out of tires — but not before finding 12 trees with dendroglyphs. To document the finds, the archaeologists took thousands of overlapping pictures, capturing an image of every centimeter of each tree.
The team also spotted grinding stones and other tools scattered around the base of the trees. Considering that large boabs provide shade in a desert with little cover, the prevalence of these objects suggests that people probably used the trees as resting spots as well as navigational markers while traveling across the desert, the researchers report in their study.

Some of the carvings on the boabs were of emu and kangaroo tracks. But an overwhelming majority of the engravings were of snakes, some of which undulated across the bark while others coiled onto themselves. The knowledge provided by Garstone and her family, along with historical records from the area, points toward the carvings being linked to the King Brown Snake Dreaming.

“It was surreal,” Garstone says. Seeing the dendroglyphs confirmed the stories passed down in her family and is “pure evidence” of the ancestral connection to country, she says. The rediscovery has been healing, especially for her mother and aunt, both now in their 70s. “All of this was nearly lost because they didn’t grow up in their homeland with their families,” she says.

Maintaining the connection
The work to find and document carved boabs in the Tanami and in other parts of the country has just begun. But this initial foray reveals the “vital importance” of scientists working in collaboration with First Nations knowledge holders, says Smith.

O’Connor is organizing another expedition to find the rest of the engravings that Lewis spotted, though she intends to take better wheels or — ideally — a helicopter. Garstone is planning on coming along with more of her extended family in tow.

In the meantime, O’Connor says that their work appears to have stimulated interest among researchers and other Aboriginal groups to rediscover the lost art form and preserve it for future generations.

“Our connection to country is so important to maintain because it makes us who we are as First Nations people,” adds Garstone. “To know that we have a rich cultural heritage and to have our own museum in the bush is something we will treasure forever.”

Scientists have teamed up with tiger sharks to uncover the largest expanse of seagrasses on Earth.

A massive survey of the Bahamas Banks — a cluster of underwater plateaus surrounding the Bahama archipelago — reveals 92,000 square kilometers of seagrasses, marine biologist Oliver Shipley and colleagues report November 1 in Nature Communications. That area is roughly equivalent to half the size of Florida.

The finding expands the estimated global area covered by seagrasses by 41 percent — a potential boon for Earth’s climate, says Shipley, of the Herndon, Va.–based ocean conservation nonprofit Beneath The Waves.
Seagrasses can sequester carbon for millennia at rates 35 times faster than tropical rainforests. The newly mapped sea prairie may store 630 million metric tons of carbon, or about a quarter of the carbon trapped by seagrasses worldwide, the team estimates.

Mapping that much seagrass was a colossal task, Shipley says. Guided by previous satellite observations, he and colleagues dove into the sparkling blue waters 2,542 times to survey the meadows up close. The team also recruited eight tiger sharks to aid their efforts. Similar to lions that stalk zebra through tall grasses on the African savanna, the sharks patrol fields of wavy seagrasses for grazing animals to eat (SN: 1/29/18; SN: 5/21/19, SN: 2/16/17).

“We wouldn’t have been able to map anywhere near the extent that we mapped without the help of tiger sharks,” Shipley says.

The team captured the sharks with drumlines and hauled each one onto a boat, mounting a camera and tracking device onto the animal’s back before releasing it. The sharks were typically back in the water in under 10 minutes. The team operated like “a NASCAR pit crew,” Shipley says.

Researchers had previously suggested tracking seagrass-grazing sea turtles and manatees to locate pastures. But tiger sharks were a smart choice because they roam farther and deeper, says Marjolijn Christianen, a marine ecologist at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands who was not involved in the new work. “That’s an advantage.”
Shipley and colleagues plan to collaborate with other animals — including ocean sunfish — to uncover more submarine meadows (SN: 5/1/15). “With this [approach], the world’s our oyster,” he says.

[In the late 1960s], about the best means of cleaning up oil was to put straw on it, then scoop up the oily straw by hand or with pitchforks. Now industry … has devised an arsenal of oil cleanup chemicals. Thin-layer chemicals can be used to herd oil together and to thicken it…. Chemicals are available as absorbents too. Still other chemicals … disperse oil throughout the water. Other chemicals show promise as oil-burning agents.

Update
Chemicals are the norm today, but the future of oil-cleanup technology may well be microbial. In recent years, researchers have shown that soil microbes broke down some of the oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico (SN Online: 6/26/15). And electrical bacteria, which channel electricity through their threadlike bodies, could help by turning oil munchers’ waste into fuel for the microbes, scientists reported (SN: 7/16/22 & 7/30/22, p. 24). Microbial mops aren’t yet ready for prime time, so chemical dispersants, fire and spongelike sorbents remain key tools in cleanup kits.

A toddler girl is flourishing after receiving treatment for a rare genetic disease. In a first for this disease, she received that treatment before she was even born.

Sixteen-month-old Ayla has infantile-onset Pompe disease — a genetic disorder that can cause organ damage that begins before birth. Babies born with Pompe have enlarged hearts and weak muscles. If left untreated, most infants die before they turn 2. Treatment typically begins after birth, but that tactic doesn’t prevent the irreversible, and potentially deadly, organ damage that happens in utero.

Ayla received treatment while still in the womb as part of an early-stage clinical trial. Today, the toddler has a normal heart and is meeting developmental milestones, including walking. Her success is a sign that prenatal treatment of the disease can stave off organ damage and improve babies’ lives, researchers report November 9 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“It’s a great step forward,” says Bill Peranteau, a pediatric and fetal surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who wasn’t involved in the work.

Infantile-onset Pompe disease is a rare condition that affects fewer than 1 out of 138,000 babies born globally. It’s caused by genetic changes that either reduce levels of an enzyme called acid alpha-glucosidase, or GAA, or prevent the body from making it at all.

Inside cellular structures called lysosomes, GAA turns the complex sugar glycogen into glucose, the body’s main source of energy. Without GAA, glycogen accumulates to dangerously high levels that can damage muscle tissue, including the heart and muscles that help people breathe.

While some people can develop Pompe disease later in life or have a less severe version that doesn’t enlarge the heart, Ayla was diagnosed with the most severe form. Her body doesn’t make any GAA. Replacing the missing enzyme through an infusion can help curb glycogen buildup, especially if treatment starts soon after birth (SN: 4/26/04).

Early studies in mice suggested that treatment before birth showed promise at controlling a Pompe-like disease. So pediatric geneticist Jennifer L. Cohen of Duke University School of Medicine and colleagues launched an early-stage clinical trial covering Pompe and seven similar conditions, broadly called lysosomal storage diseases.

The team began treating Ayla by infusing GAA through the umbilical vein when her mother was 24 weeks pregnant. Her mother received a total of six infusions, one every two weeks. After birth, the medical team has been treating Ayla with now-weekly infusions, and she will continue to need treatment throughout her life.

The therapy was safe for both mother and child, Cohen says. But until more patients are treated and monitored in the trial, it’s unclear whether this prenatal enzyme replacement is always a safe and effective option. So far, two other patients with other lysosomal storage diseases have received treatment in the trial, but it’s too early to know how they’re faring.

Researchers are also exploring in utero therapies for other rare genetic diseases, including the blood disorder alpha thalassemia. And in 2018, researchers described three children who were successfully treated for a sweating disorder before they were born.

Such approaches have the potential to treat other rare diseases in the future, Peranteau says. But it will be important to first show that any newly developed treatments are safe and work when given after birth before trying them in utero.

For now, it’s unclear how Ayla and other treated patients will fare over the long term, Cohen says. “We’re cautiously optimistic, but we want to be careful and be monitoring throughout the patient’s life. Especially those first five years, I think, are going to be critical to see how she does.”

Sea level rise may proceed faster than expected in the coming decades, as a gargantuan flow of ice slithering out of Greenland’s remote interior both picks up speed and shrinks.

By the end of the century, the ice stream’s deterioration could contribute to nearly 16 millimeters of global sea level rise — more than six times the amount scientists had previously estimated, researchers report November 9 in Nature.

The finding suggests that inland portions of large ice flows elsewhere could also be withering and accelerating due to human-caused climate change, and that past research has probably underestimated the rates at which the ice will contribute to sea level rise (SN: 3/10/22).

“It’s not something that we expected,” says Shfaqat Abbas Khan, a glaciologist at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. “Greenland and Antarctica’s contributions to sea level rise in the next 80 years will be significantly larger than we have predicted until now.”

In the new study, Khan and colleagues focused on the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, a titanic conveyor belt of solid ice that crawls about 600 kilometers out of the landmass’s hinterland and into the sea. It drains about 12 percent of the country’s entire ice sheet and contains enough water to raise global sea level more than a meter. Near the coast, the ice stream splits into two glaciers, Nioghalvfjerdsfjord and Zachariae Isstrøm.

While frozen, these glaciers keep the ice behind them from rushing into the sea, much like dams hold back water in a river (SN: 6/17/21). When the ice shelf of Zachariae Isstrøm collapsed about a decade ago, scientists found that the flow of ice behind the glacier started accelerating. But whether those changes penetrated deep into Greenland’s interior remained largely unresolved.

“We’ve mostly concerned ourselves with the margins,” says atmosphere-cryosphere scientist Jenny Turton of the nonprofit Arctic Frontiers in Tromsø, Norway, who was not involved in the new study. That’s where the most dramatic changes with the greatest impacts on sea level rise have been observed, she says (SN: 4/30/22, SN: 5/16/13).

Keen to measure small rates of movement in the ice stream far inland, Khan and his colleagues used GPS, which in the past has exposed the tortuous creeping of tectonic plates (SN: 1/13/21). The team analyzed GPS data from three stations along the ice stream’s main trunk, all located between 90 and 190 kilometers inland.

The data showed that the ice stream had accelerated at all three points from 2016 to 2019. In that time frame, the ice speed at the station farthest inland increased from about 344 meters per year to surpassing 351 meters per year.

The researchers then compared the GPS measurements with data collected by polar-orbiting satellites and aircraft surveys. The aerial data agreed with the GPS analysis, revealing that the ice stream was accelerating as far as 200 kilometers upstream. What’s more, shrinking — or thinning — of the ice stream that started in 2011 at Zachariae Isstrøm had propagated more than 250 kilometers upstream by 2021.

“This is showing that glaciers are responding along their length faster than we had thought previously,” says Leigh Stearns, a glaciologist from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who was not involved in the study.

Khan and his colleagues then used the data to tune computer simulations that forecast the ice stream’s impact on sea level rise. The researchers predict that by 2100, the ice stream will have singlehandedly contributed between about 14 to 16 millimeters of global sea level rise — as much as Greenland’s entire ice sheet has in the last 50 years.

The findings suggest that past research has probably underestimated rates of sea level rise due to the ice stream, Stearns and Turton say. Similarly, upstream thinning and acceleration in other large ice flows, such as those associated with Antarctica’s shrinking Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, might also cause sea levels to rise faster than expected, Turton says (SN: 6/9/22, SN: 12/13/21).

Khan and his colleagues plan to investigate inland sections of other large ice flows in Greenland and Antarctica, with the hopes of improving forecasts of sea level rise (SN: 1/7/20).

Such forecasts are crucial for adapting to climate change, Stearns says. “They’re helping us better understand the processes so that we can inform the people who need to know that information.”

Across Central and South America, one group of bejeweled frogs is making a comeback.

Harlequin frogs — a genus with over 100 brightly colored species — were one of the groups of amphibians hit hardest by a skin-eating chytrid fungus that rapidly spread around the globe in the 1980s (SN: 3/28/19). The group is so susceptible to the disease that with the added pressures of climate change and habitat loss, around 70 percent of known harlequin frog species are now listed as extinct or critically engendered.

But in recent years, roughly one-third of harlequin frogs presumed to have gone extinct since the 1950s have been rediscovered, researchers report in the December Biological Conservation.

The news is a rare “glimmer of hope” in an otherwise bleak time for amphibians around the globe, says Kyle Jaynes, a conservation biologist at Michigan State University in Hickory Corners.

The comeback frog
For Jaynes, the path to uncovering how many harlequin frogs have returned from the brink of extinction started when he heard about the Jambato harlequin frog (Atelopus ignescens). This black and orange frog was once so widespread in the Ecuadorian Andes that its common name comes from the word ”jampatu,” which means “frog” in Kichwa, the Indigenous language of the area.

Then came the fungus. From 1988 to 1989, the frogs “just completely disappeared,” Jaynes says. For years, people searched for traces of the frogs. Scientists ran extensive surveys, and pastors offered rewards to their congregants for anyone that could find one.

Then in 2016, a boy discovered a small population of Jambato frogs in a mountain valley in Ecuador. For a species that had been missing for decades, “it seemed like a miracle,” says Luis Coloma, a researcher and conservationist at the Centro Jambatu de Investigación y Conservación de Anfibios in Quito, Ecuador.

Coloma runs a breeding program for Jambato and other Ecuadorian frogs threatened with extinction. In 2019, Jaynes was part of a group of researchers visiting Coloma’s lab to see if they could work out how these frogs had cheated death. After the Jambato frogs returned to the scene, the team started hearing about other missing harlequin species being spotted for the first time in years.

Those stories led Jaynes, Coloma and their colleagues to comb through reports to see just how many harlequin frogs had reappeared. Of the more than 80 species to have gone missing since 1950, as many as 32 species were spotted in the last two decades — a much higher number than the team had expected.

“I think we were all shocked,” Jaynes says.

Ensuring conservation
The news comes with caveats. For one thing, it seems like most species avoided disappearing by a hair, and their numbers are still dangerously low. So extinction is still very much on the table. “We’ve got a second chance here,” Jaynes says. “But there is still a lot we have to do to conserve these species.”

Ensuring the continuation of the rediscovered species will depend in part on understanding how they’ve managed to survive so far. Some scientists have speculated that amphibians at higher elevations might be more susceptible to the fungus since it prefers lower temperatures.
But a cursory analysis by Jaynes and colleagues revealed that harlequin frogs are being rediscovered at all elevations across their range, indicating that something else may be at play. Jaynes suspects that there is a biological basis for which harlequin frogs live, such as having developed resistance to the fungus (SN: 3/29/18).

Studies like this one can serve as a “launching pad” for understanding how amphibians might survive the dual threats of disease and climate change, says Valerie McKenzie, a disease ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved with the study.

In the meantime, the fact that people are starting to notice the reemergence of species that were once thought to be gone forever “gives me a lot of hope that other species that are harder to observe — because they’re nocturnal or live high in the canopy — are also recovering,” she says. “It motivates me to think we should go look for them.”

Body changes at the brink of adulthood can get awkward in humans, but at least our eyes don’t pop out of our heads on stalks longer than our legs.

High-rise eyes, however, give macho pizzazz to the adult male Pelmatops fruit fly. In one of the stalkier species, P. tangliangi, the eyes-up transformation takes only about 50 minutes, a new study reports. Once stretched, the skinny eyestalks darken and harden, keeping the eyes stuck out like selfie sticks for the rest of the fly’s life.
The details of P. tangliangi’s eye lift come from the first published photo sequence of their ocular blossoming, which appears in the September Annals of the Entomological Society of America. Biologists have known that eyestalks evolved in eight different fly families. Yet Pelmatops flies have gotten so little scientific attention that a lot of their basic biology has been a string of question marks.

Video images show the eyestalks curl and rise irregularly. Yet “they are not flopping around while partly inflated,” says Xiaolin Chen, an entomologist and evolutionary biologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “They seem slightly stiff, but still flexible enough.”

Females of the species may raise shorter eyestalks too — if Chen and her colleagues have found the right females. Chen suspects that what are now named as two species, based on the few specimens available, may just be two sexes of the same species. The new paper describes a male P. tangliangi mating with a female known by a different species name. Her stalks aren’t as magnificent as his, but she has some.

While the headgear can burden a flying insect, long eyestalks may give flies some swagger. These Pelmatops and other kinds of stalk-eyed flies face off, eyestalk to eyestalk, with uppity intruders. There’s no knocking and locking stalks in fierce fly disputes though. Any pushing and shoving, Chen says, is “done with other body parts.”

Extreme eyes may also have other benefits. In the wild, Chen finds these fruit flies on long stems of Rubus berry brambles. The eyes naturally periscope outward and upward, allowing the flies to spot danger while the body stays hidden in the greenery.

To kill drug-resistant bacteria, “last-resort” antibiotics borrow a tactic from Medusa’s playbook: petrification.

New high-resolution microscope images show that a class of antibiotics called polymyxins crystallize the cell membranes of bacteria. The honeycomb-shaped crystals that form turn the microbes’ usually supple skins of fat molecules into thin brittle sheets, researchers report October 21 in Nature Communications. When the petrified membranes break, the bacteria die.

The finding was a total surprise, says Sebastian Hiller, a structural biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
Hiller, biophysicist Selen Manioğlu and their colleagues had been using the antibiotics as a control for a different experiment. When the researchers turned on their microscopes, “we saw these waffles,” Hiller says. “I immediately recognized, wow, this must be something special.”

Polymyxin antibiotics like colistin were discovered in the 1940s and are now used as a powerful last-ditch defense against bacteria that have evolved resistance to most other drugs. Researchers already knew that polymyxins somehow interfere with bacterial cell membranes. But nobody had imagined a scenario like the “waffles” the team discovered.
In the new study, Hiller and colleagues exposed bits of cell membrane from Escherichia coli to varying concentrations of colistin. Imaging with atomic force microscopy revealed that crystals formed at the minimum concentrations required to kill the bacteria. Colistin-resistant strains exposed to the drug didn’t form crystals.

The results indicate that polymyxins work by arranging the cell membrane into a crystalline structure that leaves it brittle and vulnerable. “That’s something that has not even remotely been hypothesized so far,” says Markus Weingarth, a biochemist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. “It’s a very important study. I’d even say it’s a breakthrough.”

How exactly polymyxins crystallize cell membranes remains unclear. That’s a problem because some bacteria have developed resistance to polymyxins and are becoming more widespread (SN: 5/27/16; SN: 10/30/90). Without more studies like this one to help reveal how the drugs work, scientists can’t effectively modify the antibiotics to make them more effective, Weingarth says.

Hiller hopes that this first glimpse of polymyxins’ petrifying powers will help scientists combat resistance to the antibiotics.

“Understanding these concepts will definitely bring a lot of ideas — and the potential to make new drugs,” Hiller says.

One hundred years ago, archaeologist Howard Carter stumbled across the tomb of ancient Egypt’s King Tutankhamun. Carter’s life was never the same. Neither was the young pharaoh’s afterlife.

Newspapers around the world immediately ran stories about Carter’s discovery of a long-lost pharaoh’s grave and the wonders it might contain, propelling the abrasive Englishman to worldwide acclaim. A boy king once consigned to ancient obscurity became the most famous of pharaohs (SN: 12/18/76).

It all started on November 4, 1922, when excavators led by Carter discovered a step cut into the valley floor of a largely unexplored part of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. By November 23, the team had uncovered stairs leading down to a door. A hieroglyphic seal on the door identified what lay beyond: King Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Tutankhamun assumed power around 1334 B.C., when he was about 10 years old. His reign lasted nearly a decade until his untimely demise. Although a minor figure among Egyptian pharaohs, Tutankhamun is one of the few whose richly appointed burial place was found largely intact.

An unusually meticulous excavator for his time, Carter organized a 10-year project to document, conserve and remove more than 6,000 items from Tutankhamun’s four-chambered tomb. While some objects, like Tut’s gold burial mask, are now iconic, many have been in storage and out of sight for decades. But that’s about to change. About 5,400 of Tutankhamun’s well-preserved tomb furnishings are slated to soon go on display when the new Grand Egyptian Museum, near the Pyramids of Giza, opens.

“The [Tut] burial hoard is something very unique,” Shirin Frangoul-Brückner, managing director of Atelier Brückner in Stuttgart, Germany, the firm that designed the museum’s Tutankhamun Gallery, said in an interview released by her company. Among other items, the exhibit will include the gold burial mask, musical instruments, hunting equipment, jewelry and six chariots.

Even as more of Tut’s story is poised to come to light, here are four things to know on the 100th anniversary of his tomb’s discovery.

1. Tut may not have been frail.
   Tutankhamun has a reputation as a fragile young man who limped on a clubfoot. Some researchers suspect a weakened immune system set him up for an early death.

But “recent research suggests it’s wrong to portray Tut as a fragile pharaoh,” says Egyptologist and mummy researcher Bob Brier, who is an expert on King Tut. His new book Tutankhamun and the Tomb That Changed the World chronicles how 100 years of research have shaped both Tut’s story and archaeology itself.

Clues from Tutankhamun’s mummy and tomb items boost his physical standing, says Brier, of Long Island University in Brookville, N.Y. The young pharaoh might even have participated in warfare.

Military chariots, leather armor and archery equipment buried with Tutankhamun show that he wanted to be viewed as a hunter and a warrior, Brier says. Inscribed blocks from Tutankhamun’s temple, which were reused in later building projects before researchers identified them, portray the pharaoh leading charioteers in undated battles.

If more blocks turn up showing battle scenes marked with dates, it would suggest Tutankhamun probably participated in those conflicts, Brier says. Pharaohs typically recorded dates of actual battles depicted in their temples, though inscribed scenes may have exaggerated their heroism.

The frail story line has been built in part on the potential discovery of a deformity in Tut’s left foot, along with 130 walking sticks found in his tomb. But ancient Egyptian officials were often depicted with walking sticks as signs of authority, not infirmity, Brier says. And researchers’ opinions vary about whether images of Tut’s bones reveal serious deformities.

X-rays of the recovered mummy from the 1960s show no signs of a misshapen ankle that would have caused a limp. Neither did CT images examined in 2005 by the Egyptian Mummy Project, headed by Egyptologist and former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Zahi Hawass.

Then a 2009 reexamination of the CT images by the same researchers indicated that Tutankhamun had a left-foot deformity generally associated with walking on the ankle or the side of the foot, the team reported. The team’s radiologist, Sahar Saleem of Egypt’s Cairo University, says the CT images show that Tutankhamun experienced a mild left clubfoot, bone tissue death at the ends of two long bones that connect to the second and third left toes and a missing bone in the second left toe.
Those foot problems would have “caused the king pain when he walked or pressed his weight on his foot, and the clubfoot must have caused limping,” Saleem says. So a labored gait, rather than an appeal to royal authority, could explain the many walking sticks placed in Tutankhamun’s tomb, she says.

Brier, however, doubts that scenario. Tutankhamun’s legs appear to be symmetrical in the CT images, he says, indicating that any left foot deformity was too mild to cause the pharaoh regularly to put excess weight on his right side while walking.

Whether or not the boy king limped through life, the discovery and study of his mummy made it clear that he died around age 19, on the cusp of adulthood. Yet Tut’s cause of death still proves elusive.

In a 2010 analysis of DNA extracted from the pharaoh’s mummy, Hawass and colleagues contended that malaria, as well as the tissue-destroying bone disorder cited by Saleem from the CT images, hastened Tutankhamun’s death. But other researchers, including Brier, disagree with that conclusion. Further ancient DNA studies using powerful new tools for extracting and testing genetic material from the mummy could help solve that mystery.

2. Tut’s initial obscurity led to his fame.
   After Tutankhamun’s death, ancient Egyptian officials did their best to erase historical references to him. His reign was rubbed out because his father, Akhenaten, was a “heretic king” who alienated his own people by banishing the worship of all Egyptian gods save for one.

“Akhenaten is the first monotheist recorded in history,” Brier says. Ordinary Egyptians who had prayed to hundreds of gods suddenly could worship only Aten, a sun god formerly regarded as a minor deity.

Meeting intense resistance to his banning of cherished religious practices, Akhenaten — who named himself after Aten — moved to an isolated city, Amarna, where he lived with his wife Nefertiti, six girls, one boy and around 20,000 followers. After Akhenaten died, residents of the desert outpost returned to their former homes. Egyptians reclaimed their old-time religion. Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhaten — also originally named after Aten — became king, and his name was changed to Tutankhamun in honor of Amun, the most powerful of the Egyptian gods at the time.

Later pharaohs omitted from written records any mentions of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. Tut’s tomb was treated just as dismissively. Huts of craftsmen working on the tomb of King Ramses VI nearly 200 years after Tut’s death were built over the stairway leading down to Tutankhamun’s nearby, far smaller tomb. Limestone chips from the construction littered the site.
The huts remained in place until Carter showed up. While Carter found evidence that the boy king’s tomb had been entered twice after it was sealed, whoever had broken in took no major objects.

“Tutankhamun’s ignominy and insignificance saved him” from tomb robbers, says UCLA Egyptologist Kara Cooney.

3. Tut’s tomb was a rushed job.
   Pharaohs usually prepared their tombs over decades, building many rooms to hold treasures and extravagant coffins. Egyptian traditions required the placement of a mummified body in a tomb about 70 days after death. That amount of time may have allowed a mummy to dry out sufficiently while retaining enough moisture to fold the arms across the body inside a coffin, Brier suspects.

Because Tutankhamun died prematurely, he had no time for extended tomb preparations. And the 70-day burial tradition gave craftsmen little time to finish crucial tomb items, many of which required a year or more to make. Those objects include a carved stone sarcophagus that encased three nested coffins, four shrines, hundreds of servant statues, a gold mask, chariots, jewelry, beds, chairs and an alabaster chest that contained four miniature gold coffins for Tutankhamun’s internal organs removed during mummification.

Evidence points to workers repurposing many objects from other people’s tombs for Tutankhamun. Even then, time ran out.

Consider the sarcophagus. Two of four goddesses on the stone container lack fully carved jewelry. Workers painted missing jewelry parts. Carved pillars on the sarcophagus are also unfinished.

Tutankhamun’s granite sarcophagus lid, a mismatch for the quartzite bottom, provides another clue to workers’ frenzied efforts. Something must have happened to the original quartzite lid, so workers carved a new lid from available granite and painted it to look like quartzite, Brier says.

Repairs on the new lid indicate that it broke in half during the carving process. “Tutankhamun was buried with a cracked, mismatched sarcophagus lid,” Brier says.

Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus may originally have been made for Smenkare, a mysterious individual who some researchers identify as the boy king’s half brother. Little is known about Smenkare, who possibly reigned for about a year after Akhenaten’s death, just before Tutankhamun, Brier says. But Smenkare’s tomb has not been found, leaving the sarcophagus puzzle unsolved.

Objects including the young king’s throne, three nested coffins and the shrine and tiny coffins for his internal organs also contain evidence of having originally belonged to someone else before being modified for reuse, says Harvard University archaeologist Peter Der Manuelian.
Even Tutankhamun’s tomb may not be what it appears. Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves of the University of Arizona Egyptian Expedition in Tucson has argued since 2015 that the boy king’s burial place was intended for Nefertiti. He argues that Nefertiti briefly succeeded Akhenaten as Egypt’s ruler and was the one given the title Smenkare.

No one has found Nefertiti’s tomb yet. But Reeves predicts that one wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber blocks access to a larger tomb where Nefertiti lies. Painted scenes and writing on that wall depict Tutankhamun performing a ritual on Nefertiti’s mummy, he asserts. And the gridded structure of those paintings was used by Egyptian artists years before Tutankhamun’s burial but not at the time of his interment.

But four of five remote sensing studies conducted inside Tutankhamun’s tomb have found no evidence of a hidden tomb. Nefertiti, like Smenkare, remains a mystery.

4. Tut’s tomb changed archaeology and the antiquities trade.
   Carter’s stunning discovery occurred as Egyptians were protesting British colonial rule and helped fuel that movement. Among the actions that enraged Egyptian officials: Carter and his financial backer, a wealthy British aristocrat named Lord Carnarvon, sold exclusive newspaper coverage of the excavation to The Times of London. Things got so bad that Egypt’s government locked Carter out of the tomb for nearly a year, starting in early 1924.

Egyptian nationalists wanted political independence — and an end to decades of foreign adventurers bringing ancient Egyptian finds back to their home countries. Tutankhamun’s resurrected tomb pushed Egyptian authorities toward enacting laws and policies that helped to end the British colonial state and reduce the flow of antiquities out of Egypt, Brier says, though it took decades. Egypt became a nation totally independent of England in 1953. A 1983 law decreed that antiquities could no longer be taken out of Egypt (though those removed before 1983 are still legal to own and can be sold through auction houses).

In 1922, however, Carter and Lord Carnarvon regarded many objects in Tutankhamun’s tomb as theirs for the taking, Brier says. That was the way that Valley of the Kings excavations had worked for the previous 50 years, in a system that divided finds equally between Cairo’s Egyptian Museum and an expedition’s home institution. Taking personal mementos was also common.

Evidence of Carter’s casual pocketing of various artifacts while painstakingly clearing the boy king’s tomb continues to emerge. “Carter didn’t sell what he took,” Brier says. “But he felt he had a right to take certain items as the tomb’s excavator.”
Recently recovered letters of English Egyptologist Alan Gardiner from the 1930s, described by Brier in his book, recount how Carter gave Gardiner several items from Tutankhamun’s tomb, including an ornament used as a food offering for the dead. French Egyptologist Marc Gabolde of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University has tracked down beads, jewelry, a headdress fragment and other items taken from Tutankhamun’s tomb by Carter and Carnarvon.

Yet it is undeniable that one of Tutankhamun’s greatest legacies, thanks to Carter, is the benchmark the excavation of his tomb set for future excavations, Brier says. Carter started his career as an artist who copied painted images on the walls of Egyptian tombs for excavators. He later learned excavation techniques in the field working with an eminent English Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie. Carter took tomb documentation to a new level, rounding up a crack team consisting of a photographer, a conservator, two draftsmen, an engineer and an authority on ancient Egyptian writing.

Their decade-long effort also made possible the new Tutankhamun exhibition at the Grand Egyptian Museum. Now, not only museum visitors but also a new generation of researchers will have unprecedented access to the pharaoh’s tomb trove.

“Most of Tutankhamun’s [tomb] objects have been given little if any study beyond what Carter was able to do,” says UCLA’s Cooney.

That won’t be true for much longer, as the most famous tomb in the Valley of the Kings enters the next stage of its public and scientific afterlife.