Susannah Tringe grabs a pair of green rubber boots from the back of her truck, pulls them on and wades into a pea-colored pond until she’s standing calf-deep. We’re just a few miles from Google’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif., but from where we’re standing, Silicon Valley’s urban sprawl is just a faint, hazy blur. Stilt-legged birds skitter along the banks of the pond; cord grass and still water stretch to the horizon.
“This is really mucky,” says Tringe, an environmental microbiologist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute. “You sink in at every step.” She bends down to take a murky water sample, then holds the cup up to the light.
“That looks disgusting,” laughs Susie Theroux, a postdoc in Tringe’s lab who still wrinkles her nose at the sight of the viscous gunk.
