Doctors at the time noted that soldiers with this strange emission of light seemed to fare much better than soldiers whose wounds did not. It would take nearly 140 years to figure out why. In 2001, 17-year-old high school student Bill Martin and his friend, Jonathan Curtis, won an international science fair by discovering that the soldiers had been so cold that their bodies created the perfect conditions for growing a bioluminescent bacteria, Photorhabdus luminescens, which ultimately destroyed the bad bacteria that could have killed them. Copied