Microbes & Memories in the 500 Year Microbiology Experiment

In 2014, scientists at the University of Edinburgh began a 500-year experiment: sealing microbes in glass vials, half shielded by lead, to test how long life can survive in desiccated form under cosmic and terrestrial radiation. 400 duplicate vials are stored at the University of Edinburgh-and in the Natural History Museum, London-as living legacies for future generations.

But what will become of the human context around this experiment? This book documents the society, spaces, and voices of science in 2025: a time capsule of a living campus, its people, its routines, and its values.

In 2024, at the ten-year time point of the microbial experiment, Astrophysics student Holley Conte conducted interviews with 30 students, faculty, and staff across the science campus, and captured a sweeping photographic record of lab life, common rooms, offices, and everyday moments. These interviews and images will themselves be archived alongside the microbes, with a copy of this volume to be kept alongside the vials in the University of Edinburgh and at the Natural History Museum in London.

This book weaves together three ideas:

• the scientific backbone of the 500-year experiment - its rationale, methods, constraints, and long-term challenges of continuity and legacy;
• the human narrative of working and learning in 2025 - voices, settings, aspirations, and the texture of daily life;
• reflections on legacy, memory, and continuity - how future generations might interpret or extend this project, and how scientists can plan beyond the limits of a human lifetime.

A memorable line from The Atlantic sums up the experiment’s spirit: ＂science-or some version of it-still exists in 2514.＂ That hopeful gamble underpins both this microbial project and its social companion: the hope that people centuries hence will not only reopen vials, but hear our voices, see our faces, and understand our world.

This book is written for curious readers, science enthusiasts, historians, and anyone interested in how human lives intersect with long-term science. No advanced microbiology background required - just openness to thinking in centuries and living in moments.