THIS SEEMS LIKE AN UNWISE EFFORT: Ancient dormant viruses found in permafrost, once revived, can infect amoeba. “A team of climate scientists from France, Russia and Germany has found that ancient viruses dormant for tens of thousands of years in permafrost can infect modern amoeba when they are revived. For their study, reported on the open-access site Viruses, the group collected several giant virus specimens from permafrost in Siberia and tested them to see if they could still infect modern creatures. . . . The effort by the research team followed up on prior work in 2014 that showed a 30,000-year-old virus could be revived—and that it could be infectious.”

I know, in principle what they’re doing, the way they’re doing it, should be perfectly safe. But. . .