It came from the deep: a viscous black gunk oozing from the rudder shaft of a ship. Laboratory analysis has prompted more questions than clarity, but the initial assessment of the “ship goo” yielded at least one startling discovery. The analysis confirmed that, though the goop microbes weren’t especially diverse, they were unique. The rest of the ship goo “may be lost forever.”Or maybe not. Like many university science labs that rely, in large part, on taxpayer dollars, the future of his work is up in the air.