A microbe scooped from a Yellowstone hot spring in the 1960s quietly changed the world — the heat-proof enzyme inside it made modern DNA testing possible, which means most DNA evidence in criminal cases and nearly every genetic test in use today traces back to a bug that lives in near-boiling water

A microbe scooped from a Yellowstone hot spring in the 1960s quietly changed the world — the heat-proof enzyme inside it made modern DNA testing possible, which means most DNA evidence in criminal cases and nearly every genetic test in use today traces back to a bug that lives in near-boiling water

In the summer of 1966, an undergraduate barely out of his second year knelt beside a scalding creek in Wyoming and scooped pink slime into a plastic bottle. He was not chasing a cure, a patent or a fortune. His professor wanted to know whether anything could live in water hot enough to poach a hand, and the only way to find out was to go and look. That bottle is the reason your local pathology lab can read your genome, and the reason a jury in a…