The Rock From Mars (50 page)

At least one mentor
• Ibid., pp. 52–55.

A colleague had discovered
• Ibid., pp. 35–44 and 55–64. The colleague who found the fossils—“long, thin, threadlike filaments and tiny, hollow, balloonlike balls”—was Stanley A. Tyler.

For years, Barghoorn
• Ibid., pp. 56–61.

Schopf acknowledged that
• Ibid., pp. 59–61. Barghoorn listed himself as the first author of the rushed-up paper, even though someone else (a colleague who had died recently) had done most of the initial groundbreaking work on the project all those years ago. (When Barghoorn offered to add Schopf’s name to the authors’ list, Schopf declined, feeling that his contribution had been too marginal. Instead, his mentor inserted a line acknowledging Schopf’s “assistance.”) Barghoorn’s paper brought Schopf, a second-year graduate student, his first taste of public attention. He went on the lecture circuit. In an e-mail to the author, May 6, 2005, Schopf said of the incident that Barghoorn had “told me what to do. I did it (I did not approve, then or now, but as far as I could see, I had no choice in the matter). He was boss. I was not. Heck, I was a fledgling underling. I reported this in
Cradle
because I thought then, and now, that it was pivotal to the development of the field, and I wanted Professor Cloud [Preston E. Cloud, the author of the other paper] to get due credit for spurring Barghoorn into action.”

The strategy was this
• Ibid., 184–201. Stromatolites formed from sediment trapped and bound in shallow marine waters by layered colonies of mucilage-secreting one-celled microbes. When the colonies were alive, their layered mats would be leathery or gelatinous. But these microcommunities differed from one layer to the next. The animals that dominated the uppermost layers would (scientists thought) typically be cyanobacteria—formerly called blue-green algae—that lived by photosynthesis (converting the energy of sunlight to chemical energy), with oxygen as a by-product. Living in the layers below them would be colonies of a different color and lifestyle—for example, “switch-hitting” bacteria whose metabolisms operated either with or without oxygen, and below them bacteria that would actually be
poisoned
by the slightest trace of free oxygen. Below them would be yet other totally different breeds of bug.

The ideal thing was to find sites where water had filled the animal cells with deposits of the tiny mineral (quartz) grains that made up the chert. As the grains solidified over thousands of years, they would grow through the cell walls, preserving them as fossils instead of crushing them.

In 1982 (the same
• Ibid., pp. 75–100.

Schopf himself
• Schopf had the specimens archived at the facility in London where he had been working at the time, now called the Natural History Museum.

He probed for
• The Apex fossils did not occur in stromatolites, Schopf noted in an e-mail to the author, although stromatolites from units of about the same age had been found to the west, at North Pole Dome.

After several months
• J. William Schopf, “Microfossils of the Early Archean Apex Chert: New Evidence of the Antiquity of Life,”
Science,
vol. 260 (1993): pp. 640–46.

The opening of
• Schopf lecture at Goddard. See also Schopf,
Cradle of Life,
p. 3.

Schopf’s comments generated
• Schopf would also catch some grief over the appearance. In an e-mail, he told the author that following his appearance on the NASA stage, he had gotten “creamed” by various colleagues, including a Nobel laureate he would not name, “for not being more harsh” in his condemnation of the McKay interpretation. Schopf emphasized that he had not enjoyed being cast as the naysayer and had tried to avoid the task by recommending others to do it instead.

Schopf was among
• The nanoscale animals had escaped the notice of the modern world, Robert Folk and others argued, because their size range was just below the resolution of an optical microscope and the mesh size of the filters microbiologists commonly use to strain bacteria from liquids.

Schopf maintained that the smallest
confirmed
microbes on Earth (of the genus
Mycoplasma
) were a good bit larger than some of the putative fossils in the Mars rock and yet were so small they contained only a fraction of the genes in most bacteria. These Earth microbes were so short of the usual complement of biological machinery that they could live only as parasites in the cells of other organisms.

The basic cell
• Boyce Rensberger,
Life Itself
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) describes the cell, “the fundamental particle of life,” and its workings in detail.

They were smaller
• Transcript of NASA press conference. See also Schopf,
Cradle of Life,
p. 316.

“This is half-baked
• Edward Anders, “Evaluating the Evidence for Past Life on Mars” (letter),
Science
(Dec. 20, 1996): pp. 2119–21. Donald Goldsmith,
Hunt for Life on Mars
(New York: Dutton/Penguin, 1997), pp. 101–107.

In 1961, as students
• Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada,
The Spark of Life
(Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2000), pp. 85–86; Goldsmith,
Hunt for Life on Mars,
p. 7; Charles Petit, “Pieces of the Rock,”
Air and Space
(Apr.–May 1997), pp. 38, 40–41. The 1961 claim was made by chemist Bartholomew Nagy of Fordham University in the journal
Nature
(Nov. 18, 1961). Now meteorite specialists—who lumped themselves under the tongue-tangling label
meteoriticists
(pronounced meteor-WRIT-assists)—generally labored with a bit of an inferiority complex, in a provincial borderland stuck among the larger, older fields of geology, chemistry, and astronomy. Far removed from the fundable cachet of the surging genetics and biotech enterprises, they rested “at the bottom of the pecking order” for grant money. Hungry as they were to improve this state of affairs, many confessed to fears about what an Orgueil-class public relations debacle would do to their future prospects. Regarding the meteoriticists’ fears, see also Allan Treiman’s comment to Sharon Begley and Adam Rogers, “War of the Worlds,”
Newsweek
(Feb. 10, 1997), p. 58.

This and other discredited
• Cosmochemist and meteorite specialist John Kerridge, who for a time became one of the McKay group’s most aggressive and visible critics, looked back through the literature and determined that a scientific “spasm” over evidence of life-forms in meteorites had erupted roughly once in every generation, or about every twenty to thirty years since the beginning of meteorite studies in the early nineteenth century. (See John Kerridge interview with Steven Dick, NASA archives.) Typically, a claim and the accompanying public flurry was followed by a counterassault that effectively drove the notion underground again. The question of extraterrestrial life (“Are we alone?”) was of such sensational importance that somebody would take up the baton at the “slightest hint” of evidence. And by Kerridge’s acerbic reckoning, the McKay claims were a tad overdue.

On Terrible Tuesday, the day the story leaked, the staff of ABC’s
Nightline
had faxed Kerridge a copy of the McKay paper and asked for comment. Kerridge soon found himself besieged with media phone calls. “I have never been run off my feet that way; I mean it was just extraordinary,” he would tell Dick later. “I mean I’d break off and go to the bathroom and come back and there’d be three call-waiting messages on my desk; I mean it was ludicrous. . . . God knows what it must have been like for McKay and company.”

Reporters sought Kerridge out because, although he had never studied the Allan Hills rock, he had led a NASA study of ways to look for signs of ancient life on Mars. In numerous interviews (see, for example, Petit, “Pieces of the Rock,” p. 40), he pronounced the McKay group’s claims “just pitifully short of convincing,” and “utterly unconvincing.”

In an e-mail to McKay
• Petit, “Pieces of the Rock,” pp. 40–41.

Science
magazine published
• Edward Anders, “Evaluating the Evidence”; Petit, “Pieces of the Rock,” pp. 36–41. Gibson, commenting on the Anders communication, preferred to see the glass as half full: “The first paragraph . . . is amazing. It congratulates us!” he told a reporter. “Knowing him, that he said anything positive is wonderful.”

Geologist Ralph Harvey
• Harvey’s comments were published, respectively, in Petit, “Pieces of the Rock,” p. 37; and J. K. Beatty, “The Messenger from Mars,”
Sky and Telescope
(July 1997): p. 39.

In the months
• Sharon Begley and Adam Rogers, “War of the Worlds.”

“I am appalled
• Petit, “Pieces of the Rock,” p. 40.

Gibson, ever the most
• Begley and Rogers, “War of the Worlds,” p. 56.

NASA’s reputation as a
• Author interview with numerous scientists. It was a National Science Foundation official who used the phrase “entitlement agency.”

Two chemists claimed
• Goldsmith,
Hunt for Life on Mars,
pp. 6, 91; Deborah Blum and Mary Knudson, eds.,
A Field Guide for Science Writers
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 12, 100.

But the
way
it worked
• Blum and Knudson, eds.,
A Field Guide for Science Writers
, pp. 12, 100.

One meteorite expert
• Allan Treiman commenting to Begley and Rogers, “War of the Worlds,” p. 58.

At the time of the
• Records provided to the author by the office of NASA meteorite curator Carlton Allen.

One researcher was
• Petit, “Pieces of the Rock,” pp. 36–37.

After the August
• Author interviews with Scott Borg, of the National Science Foundation, NASA officials, and others involved in the process; interagency press releases.

As government committees
• Author interviews with committee officials and scientists, including McKay and Andrew Steele, one of the sample recipients.

Not long after
• Author interviews with Treiman, McKay, and others.

Treiman had been
• Author interviews with Treiman.

“About thirty years ago
• Darwin to Henry Fawcett, Sept. 18, 1861. Cambridge University Darwin Correspondence Online Database: http://libpro13.lib.cam.ac.uk/perl/nav?pclass=calent&pkey=3257. For Darwin’s comments on the manuscript of Fawcett’s address, see “On the method of Mr. Darwin in His Treatise on the Origin of Species,”
Rep. British Association for the Advancement of Science
(1861) part 2: 141–43.

Carol Cleland of the
• Author interview with Cleland. See also Cleland, “Historical Science, Experimental Science, and the Scientific Method,”
Geology
vol. 29 (2001): pp. 987–90; Cleland, “Project Report: Philosophical Issues in Astrobiology,”
NAI, Year 4 Annual Report
(University of Colorado, Boulder); Carol Cleland and Christopher Chyba, “Does ‘Life’ Have a Definition?” in
Planets and Life: The Emerging Science of Astrobiology,
W. Sullivan and J. Baross, eds., chapter 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Experimental researchers are
• Experimental researchers often use a control, a separate experiment (in which the experimental variables are not changed) that provides a neutral reference point for comparison. For historical researchers—as in the case of the dinosaur extinction, for example—running controlled experiments is clearly untenable.

“Some [people] might draw
• Petit, “Pieces of the Rock,” p. 39.

Others thought the
• Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick,
The Living Universe
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p. 191.

NASA funded not only
• Author interviews with scientists and officials. See also Dick and Strick,
Living Universe,
p. 199.

At the height of
• Author interview with Tim McCoy, manager of the Smithsonian meteorite collection. Privately held Martian meteorites, he said, commonly sold for $1,000 to $2,000 per gram.

CHAPTER ELEVEN:
explorations

The reserved scientist
• Author interviews with McKay.

Nevertheless, the Clinton administration
• Author interviews with Dan Goldin, Wes Huntress, David McKay, and other participants and planners, as well as personal and official government documents form the main basis for the account of the vice president’s December 11, 1996, meeting and related events. The author also attended a press briefing held by participants immediately after the December 11 meeting.

Among the NASA and White House draft planning documents provided to the author and/or available in the NASA history archives were:

•                  A Sept. 5 NASA memo, “Talking Points on the Summit,” that suggests an outside group of experts similar to one mobilized to review the space station to take a “ ‘fresh look’ at what opportunities and challenges the Mars discovery and the Europa discovery pose.”

•                  A Sept. 5 NASA draft called “Administrator’s Guidance Regarding Mars Exploration Strategy” that states as second of six points: “NASA will not use inconclusive scientific data from the meteorite as a basis to seek a budget increase for Mars-related missions.” The other points emphasize the need to partner with other agencies and nations, engage the public, and rely on “appropriate” outside experts and scientific procedures to decide on “how and where we should go” to conduct space science research.

•                  NASA memo, Sept. 18, 1996, from NASA’s Alan Ladwig, associate administrator for policy and plans, stating that the purpose of the summit was “to gain an understanding of the near-term funding requirements to sustain NASA’s current programs and to discuss the long range future of the space program. A significant purpose . . . will also be to discuss how America should pursue answers to the scientific questions raised by the meteorite, as well as other recent findings on Europa, a moon of Jupiter.”