Bacteria Come to the Rescue of Native American Relics

In the last two decades, museums have been returning Native American artifacts to their tribes at the demand of the government, but some of the head dresses, masks, and clothes were tainted with toxic mercury from pesticides. At first it sounds like a sick retread of one of the most terrible stories in American history, but it was an awful accident. But now Munira Albuthi, a biologist at the University of Colorado Denver, announced this week at the American Society for Microbiology meeting that she thinks she can solve the problem with bacteria. After the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, tribes could ask museums to return artifacts taken from their ancestors. But over the years, many museums used pesticides, including DDT before it was banned in the U.S., to prevent bugs from chewing up priceless items in their collections. Often those chemicals contained mercury, and in 2003 ...