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ot long ago, Joe Davis, the "artist-scientist" in George Church's genetics lab at Harvard Medical School, was in Brittany, France. The region is known for thousand-year-old salterns that produce fleur de sel, or flower of salt-salt that forms as seawater evaporates. Davis was there sampling these brightly colored ponds with a microscope, and found in the shallow waters an abundance of diverse halophiles, organisms that can grow in and tolerate saline conditions. "I wondered what happens to these organisms," he said. "The salt is evaporating, the water's gone. The organisms aren't just going to disappear. Where are they?"