Conan the Bacterium Even a total, all-out, no-holds-barred nuclear war wouldn’t destroy all life on a planet. Consider the organism Deinococcus radiodurans. Scientists first isolated it in 1956 from a can of ground beef; the beef had been radiation-sterilized, but the meat still spoiled. It turns out that D. radiodurans can survive an exposure to gamma-radiation of 1.5 million rads. For comparison, a dose of 1000 rads is usually enough to kill a man.
