The sunny day that greeted me was a pleasant surprise when the flight landed at Logan International Airport in Boston, because I expected that it would be a cold and wintry day since it was late March in the North. I was reading a book called "China Ink," which introduces current Chinese journalists, during my whole flight and wasn't aware of our arrival until the last minute. I had prepared a long time for his journey which was going to give me a great chance to meet some great journalists from the Knight Journalism Fellowships program at MIT--and most important, they are experienced journalists working in China. That would be a great trip, I told myself. Actually, it was indeed.
The first thing in my tiny scheduler was to attend the program's regular Tuesday seminar. It was very much like what we have in every Wednesday's class--a guest speaker tells us his/her stories about his/her fields and answers our questions. The speaker--Mr. Brendan Foley--introduced how to use deep water robots to survey the sea floor and explore the human past. The most interesting thing was that the archaeologists began to use molecular biological techniques to analyze the substances in the ancient jar which was found in the deep sea. According to the result of DNA analysis, some substances have been proved to be olive and grape fragments. Out of curiosity, I asked the speaker whether his team had ever tried to analyze the substances by using a microbiological technique? As I know, in some forms, the bacteria and virus can survive for hundreds of years or under extreme conditions. If the scientists had already successfully determined the 1918 flu virus's genetics sequence by using historic tissue samples recovered from a female flu victim buried in Alaska, why can't we imagine that we might find something more in those jars? Maybe some ancient virus, I guess.
(To be continued... upcoming--visiting of IHI)
