contained a stretch of sixty-two letters that has been found in all living things since the dawn of creation, making it not only arguably alive but as ancient as anything else on Earth.*2 Birtles named the new virus mimivirus, for “microbe-mimicking.” When Birtles and his colleagues wrote up their findings, they couldn’t at first find any journal that would publish them, because they were too bizarre. The cooling tower was knocked down in the late 1990s, and it appears that the only colony of this odd and ancient virus was lost with it. Since then, however, other colonies of even more
