Halfway through breakfast, Joe Thornton gets a call from his freezer. A local power cut has triggered an alarm on the -80 ℃ appliance in his lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and it has sent out an automatic call. Thornton breaks off our conversation and calls his senior research scientist, Jamie Bridgham, to make sure that the back-up generator has kicked in. If the freezer starts warming up, a lot could be lost - not least a valuable collection of proteins that had been extinct for hundreds of millions of years until Thornton and his team brought them back from the dead.
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