Worms frozen in permafrost for up to 42,000 years come back to life

Nematodes, which were revived here, were also the first cellular species which was found to survive deep in the earths crust - in a study which also featured one of the same Princeton researchers (T. C. Onstott [1]) collaborating with a different group of international researchers:

> "Nematode found in mine is first subsurface multicellular organism"

> Until now, it was thought that the temperature, energy, oxygen and space constraints of the subsurface biosphere were too extreme for multicellular organisms. [2]

This is interesting news but I'm curious if this will be largely limited to this unique type of (multicellular) organism which can survive extreme conditions?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullis_Onstott

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07obworm.html

I misread the title as "Woman frozen ..." and mentally prepared myself for some existentially shattering shit.

For anyone wondering about previous precedents for reviving frozen multicellular creatures, here's my response to a now-deleted comment:

There are shorter-term examples of frogs [0] (up to a few years) and tardigrades [1] (30 years) but I haven't heard of anything on this timescale before.

[0]http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-alaskan-...

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/18/10785002/water-bear-tardi...

Edit: formatting

Halflife under normal circumstances. Deepfreezing it is not the usual for DNA. Just like your meat and vegetables are still edible when you freeze them a year later and spoil in a matter of hours or days at higher temperatures.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/10...

So that's at 13.1 degrees, quote from the end of that paper:

"Our results indicate that short fragments of DNA could be present for a very long time; at –5°C, the model predicts a half-life of 158 000 years for a 30 bp mtDNA fragment in bone (table 1). Even rough estimates such as this imply that sequenceable bone DNA fragments may still be present more than 1 Myr after deposition in deep frozen environments. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that future research may identify authentic DNA that is significantly older than the current record of approximately 450–800 kyr from Greenlandic ice cores".

So even if they don't have a thermal model where you plug in any temperature and it will give you the half life there is good evidence that lower temperatures significantly increase the chances of DNA remaining intact for much longer than the above-zero half life would suggest.

Indeed, if such a woman had been unfrozen, would she be too important of a scientific discovery to ever be allowed to live a normal human life again? Would she just be a research subject quarantined and experimented on for the rest of her days?