Inmortalidad De La Medusa

AoW 16
Directions: 1. Mark your confusion. 2. Show evidence of a close reading. Mark up the text with questions and/or comments. 3. Write a one-page reflection on your own sheet of paper.

Can aJellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?
Source: Martin Cohen, New York Times/ November 28, 2012 After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim toldGilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly byChristian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzscheconceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .” Sommer was conducting research onhydrozoans, small invertebrates that, depending on their stage in the life cycle, resemble either a jellyfish or a soft coral. Every morning, Sommer went snorkeling in the turquoise water off the cliffsof Portofino. He scanned the ocean floor for hydrozoans, gathering them with plankton nets. Among the hundreds of organisms he collected was a tiny, relatively obscure species known to biologists asTurritopsis dohrnii. Today it is more commonly known as the immortal jellyfish. Sommer kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their reproduction habits. After several days he noticed that hisTurritopsis dohrnii was behaving in a very peculiar manner, for which he could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die. It appeared to age in reverse, growing youngerand younger until it reached its earliest stage of development, at which point it began its life cycle anew. Sommer was baffled by this development but didn’t immediately grasp its significance. (It...