At the time, Dr. Shipway was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of the marine biologist Dan Distel at Northeastern University, part of which is safely housed in a former World War II bunker. Dr. Distel, the director of Northeastern University Ocean Genome Legacy Center and an author on the paper, studies shipworm symbionts, which are the bacteria in the animal’s gills that allow them to break down cellulose in wood.