The Rock From Mars (21 page)

Boeder’s battle cry in every policy battle over the years had been “Credibility!” NASA’s credibility. She had made the care and maintenance of that precious commodity her top priority. “If you don’t have that,” she would say to her staff, “you have nothing.”

Regarding the problem at hand, her first thought had been how unfair it would be if David McKay’s results were released without him being there. She felt the pressure to fill the ravening maw of journalism, to “feed the beast,” but there were times, she thought, when you just had to say no.

The next thing Nan Broadbent knew, NASA administrator Dan Goldin was on the phone asking for her. Although he was no particular fan of the embargo system, Goldin felt humiliated, frustrated, and incensed by the story’s early escape. It could undermine both his and the agency’s credibility. And the worst thing of all would be if the “leak” had come from NASA. That concern was the source of much of the consternation and anger at NASA in those hours.

Broadbent did not take Goldin’s call but passed it to her boss, Nicholson. At that point, Broadbent figured, Nicholson must have been convinced she was about to quit. He didn’t realize she was still recovering from the flu. And she knew she
had
gone quite pale.

The two executives had an animated conversation. After a time, Nicholson came back down to Broadbent’s office and remarked warmly of Goldin, “Well, that’s a very pleasant man.”

The magazine was releasing the Mars rock paper. The journalists had forced the issue. The AP’s Paul Recer transmitted a wire story at 1:51
P
.
M
. eastern time, saying, “A meteorite that fell to Earth after possibly being ejected from Mars may bear chemical evidence that life once existed on that planet, NASA officials said Tuesday.” Less than ten minutes later, Britain’s BBC1 television channel announced the news, and at 2:27
P
.
M
. eastern time, CNN reported it. None of the early stories quoted the scientists making the claims.

The
Science
staff was appalled at some initial media missteps, notably some slapdash initial coverage by CNN, in which an old tape was recycled in a way that made it seem to be a new comment on the Mars rock, and a reporter calling the fossil-like shapes in the rock “something like maggots.” The CNN coverage got better. Then there was a late-afternoon AP dispatch quoting an unidentified scientist “familiar with the study” (but not on the McKay team) as saying the discovery was “unequivocal.”

Both NASA and
Science
were abruptly engulfed in a barrage of phone calls. A horde of relentless TV producers, reporters, editors, and other foot soldiers of the communications age converged on the story.

Broadbent’s staff scrambled to distribute a four-page press release. They ended up having to release the McKay group manuscript itself with handwritten editors’ notes still in the margins, because the final version of the paper had not been typeset.

Written text was not enough, of course. Reporters had questions. They needed give-and-take with actual humans. Clamoring for access to the paper’s authors, journalists were dismayed to learn that NASA (though it had issued two press releases) still had the scientists under orders not to talk to the media before the big announcement at headquarters the next day.

But NASA could not control all of those who knew the story.

Keeping the secret of the rock had become almost unbearable for Richard Zare. He spent many a night sleepless from the combination of excitement and sheer terror of making such an amazing claim. He was more aware than ever of the ridicule and contempt that had plagued predecessors along this same path. He couldn’t escape the feeling that he might be next.

Though Zare’s public image was that of a big shot whose career had been crowned with success, he had never defined himself by his accomplishments. He was always driven to seek a more demanding and worthy test. He saw himself as driven not by ego but by the lack of it. This was why, he would conclude later, he was so unprepared for what was about to happen.

On August 5, while attending a conference in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Zare had gotten a call from a distraught Everett Gibson in Houston. Bits and pieces of the story seemed to be getting out, Gibson warned him. Zare stuck to his schedule and flew back to Palo Alto the next day, Terrible Tuesday. Waiting for him was a series of messages Gibson had left on his answering machine, each one increasingly frantic. Zare was not to speak to the press under any circumstances, Gibson warned, before the press conference in Washington the next day. NASA had already contacted Zare’s trusty postdoc Simon Clemett, along with David Salisbury, a seasoned Stanford University information officer, and they were ready to fly east. Zare had no choice but to join them and head right back to the airport.

A film crew from CNN awaited Zare and company at the departure gate at San Francisco airport with a volley of questions. Salisbury fended them off. The Stanford men boarded their plane, which meandered around the tarmac for half an hour before the captain pronounced the flight canceled due to mechanical problems.

The three retreated to the frequent-flier lounge to wait for the next plane to Washington—the red-eye, scheduled to depart five hours later. The TV monitor was tuned to CNN (which had always taken a special interest in space-related news). Zare, focusing his bleary eyes on the screen, was stunned to see NASA people on the air talking about the rock. He was also appalled to hear a CNN comment that compared the possible fossilized bacteria to maggots. This was seriously misleading on a number of levels, Zare thought. For starters, there were significant differences between bacteria and worms!

At around three-thirty
P
.
M
. West Coast time,
Science
magazine’s Nan Broadbent reached Zare’s party in the lounge. She told them that the magazine was canceling the embargo, and—contrary to the instructions from NASA—she encouraged Zare and Clemett to start talking to the press immediately.

The phone next to Zare’s chair in the lounge began to ring. The
New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe,
and half a dozen other papers had been directed to his location by the
Science
staff or the Stanford news office.

While NASA officials still had McKay and the Houston contingent under a gag order, they lacked the authority to muzzle the Stanford contingent. (Zare, among his many roles, was a member of the editorial board of
Science.
)

Zare and Clemett spent more than three straight hours on the phone helping a succession of journalists understand the complexities of the story. (Yes, there was evidence that microscopic life
might
have existed on Mars, billions of years ago, but it was far from conclusive; no, there was no indication that anything was still alive on the planet today—and so on.)

While Zare was talking to a
Los Angeles Times
writer, a film crew from ABC’s
Nightline
came clanging in with their equipment to tape an interview. When the flight to the East was called at last, a CNN crew chased the three to the gate, where Zare gave them a few more sound bites. Network crews would be lined up to greet them at their destination as well.

During the flight, Zare had an attack of nerves. His head was telling him to treat this story as he would any other piece of research, never mind the Warhol factor. Was the hypothesis sound? Had he and his coworkers followed the proper protocols? But his heart was pounding audibly, overwhelming rational thought. For the first time, he allowed himself to feel the true dimensions of what he and the others were claiming. If their interpretation of the evidence was correct, the human species was on the brink of a turning point of staggering proportions. Then, once again, that stab of apprehension: What if they were wrong?

Either way, he realized, it was out of his control.

A few weeks earlier, Bill Schopf of UCLA, the noted paleobiologist and one of the experts the McKay group had consulted, had taken a call from NASA headquarters. It was an invitation to appear at the planned press conference to provide an independent evaluation of the McKay group’s evidence.

Goldin and his top lieutenants were mindful that many scientists considered “press conference science” wrongheaded. Just publish in journals and let the work speak for itself, the argument went. But the work in this case
had
passed peer review. And by recruiting a heavyweight like Schopf to point out any weaknesses, the NASA people reasoned, they could ensure that the announcement would be seen as properly balanced and cautious.

Schopf soon realized that this was the same rock whose innards he had examined more than a year earlier when he’d visited Houston. He had told the group about his reservations back then, and he was surprised to learn their work had reached this stage now.

Before accepting NASA’s invitation, Schopf asked the agency to send a copy of the McKay paper overnight to his office. After studying it, Schopf had so many reservations he tried to get Goldin’s team to invite somebody else. But NASA persisted. Dan Goldin himself made the request. Schopf admired Goldin, and besides, he agreed with Goldin’s strategy. The claim
did
need an assessment by “a hard-nosed outsider,” and he certainly fit the bill. He reluctantly agreed to do it.

Schopf was in the process of preparing his arguments and some accompanying display charts when Terrible Tuesday arrived. He, too, got the summons from NASA headquarters: “Bill, get on the one-thirty afternoon flight. There’s been a news leak—the press conference has been moved up.”

Arriving at NASA headquarters the next morning, Schopf was escorted to NASA’s lower-level studio, where McKay, Gibson, and the other principals were seated. Boeder and Savage and other NASA brass were there. The new arrival was a man of moderate build with short dark hair that had receded up his expansive forehead and a generous mouth with prominent teeth set in a jutting jawline.

This was a “prep session”—a dress rehearsal for the press conference.

Memories would differ about exactly who said what to whom in the course of this particular dress rehearsal. But the event embodied the conflicts that often emerged when scientists had to explain themselves to the public, with dashes of ego and institutional rivalry to spice up the fray. The importance of the topic intensified the differences. This session would create an impression in the minds of some that would lead to charges later on that NASA officials tried to hype the story of the rock for their own bureaucratic purposes.

First thing in that session, Schopf pulled out a bunch of transparencies showing typed text. To astrophysicist Edward Weiler, then NASA’s chief scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope, it looked as if Schopf thought he was at a university symposium rather than a televised presentation to the global village. The two immediately got crosswise.

Weiler spoke up: “You’re not going to show those at the press conference, are you?”

Schopf said, “Oh, yes I am.”

“Have you ever done television before? That stuff won’t show up. It’ll be a disaster.”

Events had led Weiler to become quite an enthusiastic student of the art of packaging science news for the media, especially television. He was a key player in overhauling the way NASA presented its most important research results, including a series of news updates that included video and graphics, dissenting points of view, context, and a tilt toward English over jargon. The perceived success of this approach in attracting media coverage fed a current of indignation among those who considered such efforts unseemly.

Weiler was convinced that the approach was an effective way to make valid NASA science news available to the people who paid for it. Reporters were always free to do their own assessment of the news offering, call their own independent experts, and blow the whole thing off if it didn’t hold up.

Schopf was not the only one with unwanted last-minute additions that day. The McKay team had brought about twenty new graphics with them, to be shown on the TV monitors that would flank the stage at the press conference. The graphics showed various features in the rock and supporting data. The team insisted they could not make their presentation unless they showed all of these—in addition to about a dozen of their best transparencies, which had been sent in earlier. To the public affairs people, this was turning into something of a nightmare.

A scientist always wanted to present as much ammunition as possible, to make the point clearly. But this depth of detail would quickly lose an audience. Even
Science
and other top research journals required a lot more shortening and simplifying than many authors were comfortable with. The work of science was necessarily slow, precise, careful, detailed, complicated, and cautious. The journalist’s enterprise was fast, short, often imprecise, and hungry for drama and certitude. It was hardly surprising that there was a clash whenever the two cultures tried to marry up.

In the end, NASA’s Savage backed McKay. He decided it was more important that the researchers felt comfortable and were able to tell their story their way. He and his staff knew the press wouldn’t use most of it. (They didn’t.) But it was important for the scientists’ state of mind.

Some of those on hand had witnessed McKay and Gibson’s beaming, ebullient, high-energy performance under Goldin’s interrogation just days earlier. The onlookers could hardly recognize the people in front of them now. Their delivery seemed plodding, flat.

Finally, McKay and his group completed their dry run.

Schopf gave his rebuttal. By this time, Goldin was among the growing crowd of listeners who had wandered in. When Schopf finished speaking, there was a marked silence. Then (as Schopf would remember it) Laurie Boeder addressed the McKay group: “Schopf has just demolished you. Can’t you guys be more positive?”

Boeder could be tough. She had been arguing all along that the scientists who’d done the work should be the ones who put it out there. It was her policy never to meddle with the
substance
of the science on this or other stories. But she was also a political appointee who had spent her career in public service advising people how to communicate with the public about what they were doing. And she knew that anybody who didn’t practice for an important announcement was not serving well either themselves or the people they were talking to. Scientists needed to communicate clearly. If you couldn’t tell your story, you didn’t get support—that is, money. You needed to be able to tell the people who paid for the work—the taxpayers—why it was worth their money. And that went to the issue of NASA’s credibility—her mantra.