Thinking about this some more...
I would be very fearful to have alien tissue, blood, fluids in my possession. Why? Because they are not native to our planet, you have no idea of the
infectivity of such things.
In fact this fear would also include an authentic alien artifact. As we all know, bugs live on things. Alien bugs may not be able to be killed even
with high heat or any Earth disinfectant.
This is one thing that makes me doubt 'physical' contact, or that we have any artifiacts. Even advanced civilizations make mistakes and like the
lesson of Jurassic Park, chaos wants to reign.
If we had anything alien come here, I'd be very surprised if it didn't cause an outbreak of some strange virus or disease, again the lesson of War
of the Worlds where Earth bacteria brought them down when the a-bomb wouldn't.
So let's hope you -don't- have any alien tissue in your freezer.
There's only one sure way to -safely- 'visit' an alien world and that's using holograms and virtual contact. IOW, you are not actually physically
present in this space/time or dimension. Thus contamination, at least as we understand it could not occur. Of course what seems real to us could be
advanced virtual, but that's another story.
For an advanced culture, scrupulously avoiding contamination either way would be of paramount importance. I.e. they would not want to risk
-accidentally- destroying the thing they want to study, etc.
[edit on 1-12-2007 by Badge01]