A SOUTH African microbiologist jetted off to Siberia at the weekend on a mission that sounds like it’s straight out of a Hollywood sci-fi movie. Frank T. Robb plans to capture as many ‘extremophile’ microbes as he can from Siberia’s volcanic geysers and sulphur pits before shooting them into space in rockets. Once in space, he intends testing them to destruction to gauge their resistance to hard radiation and heat. The bugs that survive may hold the secret to colonising other worlds, and the history of how life started on earth. Extremophiles are bugs which can survive in extreme conditions, varying from extreme cold in Siberia’s blizzards to the extreme fire-and-ice terrain of the Kamchatka-peninsula where Robb and his team are headed. The multi-national team of scientists hope to prove that bugs which can resist high heat can also resist radiation Robb, a former lecturer in the microbiology department at the University of Cape Town, is the team’s co-leader of the weeklong mission to sample both modern and ancient extremophile microbes. He is currently based at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) on the east coast of the USA.