Source the telegraph
Jean-Michel Claverie was already at retirement age when he travelled to Siberia to hunt for ancient viruses in the Arctic. After a long career as a research scientist – and 25 years since he had set up a laboratory outside Marseille with his wife Chantal Abergel – he could have put his feet up. He and Abergel, who is 62, commute to their lab from a comfortable house near the pretty harbour town of Cassis. But Claverie, who was about to turn 70, had no intention of hanging up his lab coat.
It took days, several flights and a ride in a rickety boat made from old war plane parts to reach the banks of the Kolyma river west of Chersky, a remote town not far from the East Siberian Sea. Once a transit hub for Soviet Gulags, Chersky and its river had become a magnet for scientists trying to unearth secrets from the frozen deep.