It’s a scene that sounds like it was lifted from Alien—a researcher interested in extraterrestrial life descends into the depths of a cave, where a droplet filled with creepy crawlies lands smack dab in her eye.
“I was like, ‘OK, I’m pretty sure that something alive fell in my eye,’” says Penelope Boston. She is now a portfolio scientist at NASA, but experienced this mortifying episode deep inside New Mexico’s Lechuguilla Cave in 1994.
Spelunkers often refer to their passion as catching the “cave bug.” In Boston’s case, the idiom was literal. Despite the injuries and harrowing moments she endured in her initial foray to the underworld—and the microbes that had