ABOVE: COURTESY OF SANDEEP ESWARAPPA
Seven years ago, Sandeep Eswarappa flipped on the documentary television show Cosmos and was instantly engrossed in the episode’s topic: tardigrades. That the pinhead-size critters can endure extreme environments on Earth and in space was awesome enough. But it was the fact that these organisms, also called water bears, survived all five mass extinctions on Earth that caught Eswarappa’s attention, he tells The Scientist. “I decided then that when I came back to India to start my own lab, tardigrades would be one of my projects.”
At the time he saw the Cosmos episode, Eswarappa was a postdoctoral fellow in cell biology at the Cleveland Clinic studying cancer and other pathologies associated with the abnormal growth of blood vessels. About a year later, in 2015, he was tapped to launch his own group at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and he recruited graduate ...
