Cara Magnabosco takes a water sample on the way to BedrettoLab. swissinfo.ch / Michele Andina
As a child, Cara Magnabosco wanted to be a professional soccer player. Then curiosity got the better of her and she decided to study science. Now the Zurich-based professor is searching for the origins of life – far below the earth’s surface.
This content was published on August 21, 2022 – 10:00 am August 21, 2022 – 10:00 am Christian Raaflaub
Radio, TV and online journalist.
If you’re traveling from the Nuffenen pass in the canton of Valais to Ticino in southern Switzerland, you can’t miss the Finestra di BedrettoExternal link – the Bedretto window. Yet hardly anyone notices this entrance to the pass in the mountain.
The passage was originally dug into the rock as an access road to the 15 km long Furka Main Tunnel. The tunnel accommodates vehicles traveling from east to west. It’s also where Cara Magnabosco External link explores the origins of life in the universe, 1,500 meters below the Earth’s surface.
For this purpose, Magnabosco travels to Ticino every few months. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit covered in reflective strips and a helmet, with a life preserver (oxygen supply mask) strapped to her shoulders, the 33-year-old geobiologist looks just like a road worker.
>> Video of Cara Magnabosco at work, deep underground and in her laboratory in Zurich
Whenever Magnabosco makes the two-kilometer journey horizontally up the mountain to reach Bedretto Lab, an underground laboratory at the Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich, she can rely on the oxygen equipment to re-emerge from the tunnel if an emergency ever arises.
It’s cool and damp in the tunnel. There is no plaster coating. The ceiling and walls inside the Gotthard massif are made of dark rock and the ground is uneven. Still, a good ventilation system prevents the musty smell you might expect to find here. It’s quiet in the tunnel this May Monday. There are simply sparks that fly further – a work crew performs soldering. It is hard to imagine that the secret of life could be hidden somewhere in this tunnel of rocks and water.
“BedrettoLab” is located deep under the Pizzo Rotondo mountain in southern Switzerland. swissinfo.ch / Michele Andina
Samples from the depths of the earth
A kilometer and a half below the Gotthard massif, Magnabosco is looking for the oldest signs of life on our planet. Here in the bowels of the earth, she often sits for hours in darkened areas observing with a microscope or preparing samples for her laboratory.
First, she opens a faucet that is fixed in a place in the tunnel where a stream of water flows. This is water that has dripped through the rock over tens of thousands of years. She collects water samples, then scratches a little on the wet rock with a plastic tube to collect microbes.
“There could be thousands of microorganisms in that sample that have never seen the light of day,” she says. “It’s a fascinating environment.”
Down here, she explains, life forms dating back to the earliest period of Earth’s history have remained untouched by surface-level processes. This makes them suitable for the search for the origin of life in the universe.
Most of Cara Magnabosco’s work takes place in her laboratory at ETH Zurich. swissinfo.ch / Christian Raaflaub
The ingredients for life
When I meet Magnabosco for the first time in her office at the Department of Earth Sciences at ETH Zurich two months before our trip to Ticino, she shows me a young researcher prize she won. She carefully removes an ocher stone from the mountains of Oman from an ornate cardboard box.
“If I were to put this in water, we would have the most important ingredients for life – water and rock,” she says.
When life actually began is a disputed question among researchers. The answer depends on how you define life and who you ask: biologists, chemists, or philosophers.
As an assistant professor of geobiology, Magnabosco explores the boundary between living and nonliving matter.
“We’re trying to figure out where life can survive and where it can no longer survive,” she explains on a tour of the lab two floors above her office. There, together with her students, she studied the water samples they had collected in the Bedreto laboratory.
Science and adventure
Science was never the only career option for Magnabosco. She grew up with an older sister in the American state of Indiana. She has a Thai mother and an American father. Her mother is an ophthalmologist; her father works in finance. As a child, Magnabosco wanted to be a professional footballer.
Cara Magnabosco observes bacteria under an electron microscope. swissinfo.ch / Michele Andina
During her senior year of high school, she took a biotechnology course and became fascinated with DNA sequencing.
“We took DNA from our cheeks and learned how it was sequenced and analyzed,” she says. “That was really cool.” Later, she often returned to this method of analysis in her biology studies and in her own research.
As part of their course, students read Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston. This bestseller describes how, after the initial epidemics in Africa, scientists traced the origins of the Ebola virus and decoded it. The mix of adventure and science that attracted Magnabosco back then still holds sway today.
Magnabosco tells of his many research trips to places like the Svalbard Islands off the coast of Norway, Death Valley and the hot springs in Portugal.
As a doctoral student at Princeton, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, she ventures into gold mines in South Africa, where huge elevators descend into the bowels of the earth at high speed.
“H-h-h!” she says, miming the pace. In the same elevator sometimes a huge truck was lowered.
In 2019, Magnabosco applied for an assistant professorship in geobiology at ETH Zurich. Her research area fits perfectly with the new Center for the Origin and Spread of Life, which opens in September External link (see box).
New ETH Zurich Center
The new Center for the Origin and Spread of Life is scheduled to open on September 2, 2022 at the Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich.
It will be one of the first interdisciplinary and inter-university life study centers in the whole of Europe.
The center is headed by astronomer and Nobel Prize winner Didier Keloz. In 1995, together with another Swiss, Michel Major, Keloz discovered the first planet to orbit a Sun-like star. These planets are called exoplanets. Queloz will also continue to research at the University of Cambridge.
End of insertion
Magnabosco will work with a team including Swiss Nobel Prize winner Didier Keloz, who will lead the research center at two sites in and near Zurich. It should be a multidisciplinary center involving chemistry, biology, earth sciences, astrophysics and other disciplines.
Magnabosco is specifically looking for microbes that stood at the beginning of life on earth, approximately two billion years ago.
“It’s kind of like detective work,” she says of the task of understanding how these living things have evolved and influenced each other over the course of Earth’s four and a half billion year history.
Deep underground
Why does Magnabosco look for the origin of life underground on Earth, and not on the surface of other planets, where the sun also shines? To examine this question, we climb onto the roof of the Department of Earth Sciences to look at the sky.
“At least in our solar system, we know that many of the planetary surfaces are largely inhospitable,” she says. Deep underground, however, life forms are protected from the instability that can prevail on the planet’s surface.
According to Magnabosco, life is likely to exist elsewhere, not just on Earth.
“The general recipes for what we think are necessary for life seem to be able to occur on other planets,” she says. She’s hoping for some fresh insight from the James Webb telescope, which was recently launched into space to find exoplanets where life might exist.
If there is life on other planets, “we are more likely to find life similar to microorganisms,” says Magnabosco. “And as we know from Earth, more microorganisms live underground than on the surface or in the oceans.”
What does life look like?
The underground laboratory in the Thigh Valley tunnel is not exactly a separate room, but an extension of the passage. On one side are tables on which measuring instruments and computers are placed. Several thick pipes disappear into a large pool of water.
Magnabosco checks several settings on the screen. Almost all the values needed for her research could be verified from Zurich.
“But we can’t open, close or sample the boreholes,” she explains. For this reason, she is planning a trip to Ticino every month.
Cara Magnabosco checks the settings of the various boreholes in the “BedrettoLab” that she and her students collect samples from. swissinfo.ch / Michele Andina
In the search for life in the universe and here on Earth, many assumptions about life forms must be rejected. It is difficult, for example, to imagine living in boiling water. Yet there are microbes that can live and reproduce even at higher temperatures than this.
In 1966, in a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park in the United States, microbiologist Thomas Brock discovered a bacterium that could live above the boiling point of water. Brock’s work led to the PCR test now used to detect Covid-19 infections.
In her student days, Magnabosco is fascinated by Brock. The late scientist, who died aged 94 last year,…
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