The Rock From Mars (56 page)

Besides, the Allan Hills
• Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), “Scientific Goals, Objectives, Investigations and Priorities,” July 16, 2004, at website http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:FKd3NK5E7wlJ:mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/goals/MEPAG-goals-approved-716-04.doc.

Farther down the hall
• Gibson had gotten interested in the topic almost a quarter century earlier, as a member of an Antarctic meteorite search team.

One explanation was
• For discussion of possible sources of methane on Mars, see David Tenenbaum, “Mystery Methane Maker: Wanted Dead or Alive,”
Astrobiology Magazine
, July 27, 2005, at:

The previous year, in
• Author interviews with Steele and Hans Amundsen of the University of Oslo, Norway; and lectures by them, Oct. 4, 2004, at the Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C. Amundsen was the leader of the multidisciplinary Arctic Mars Analogue Svalbard Expedition (AMASE). The project included scientists from Carnegie; the University of Leeds; Universidad de Burgos, Spain; GEMOC; Macquarie University, Australia; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston; and Penn State University.

Several types of
• Unable to investigate the real Mars in person, scientists were seeking accessible analogues. For example, researchers camped out with a robot named Zoe in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert—one of the most arid regions on Earth—to study the rare life there with the goal of developing life-detection criteria for Mars and other worlds. (See NASA and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Sept. 24, 2004, press release. See also “Seeking Earthly Clues to Alien Life,” Astronomy.com, accessed Oct. 24, 2002.) At the Eureka Weather Station on Ellesmere Island in Canada’s Arctic Nunavut territory, 690 miles from the North Pole, engineers planned to test the Mars Drill, a futuristic drilling rig being developed at Johnson Space Center for use on Mars or Earth’s moon. (NASA was considering a drilling mission to Mars possibly in 2018.) And the activist citizens group the Mars Society was setting up Mars research bases on Devon Island, in the Canadian Arctic, and other spots.

As Steele’s Svalbard
• Geophysicist Hans E. F. Amundsen, University of Oslo, at Royal Norwegian Embassy session on “The Search for Life in the Solar System,” in cooperation with the Carnegie Institution, Oct. 4, 2004.

“It’s assumed we’ll look
• The Svalbard team did achieve what Steele, reporting in September 2004, called “a major milestone.” They showed that, assuming Mars life is at all similar to earth life, “we’ll be able to find even a single cell.” They had deployed a suite of life-detection instruments, such as Steele’s off-the-shelf package that included standard genetic techniques and, among other things, protein microarrays that could test for the presence of hundreds or thousands of biological building-block molecules at once. In 2005, the immunology technology pioneered by Steele and his coworkers was accepted for flight aboard the European Space Agency’s proposed ExoMars mission. Methods and devices developed by the Svalbard project would also compete for roles in NASA’s 2009 and 2011 Mars missions.

The research focused
• “Small World,”
Astrobiology Magazine
(May 13, 2004). See also E. Olavi Kajander, I. Kuronen, and N. Ciftcioglu, “Fetal Bovine Serum: Discovery of Nanobacteria,”
Molecular Biology of the Cell,
suppl. vol. 7 (1996): p. 517a; E. O. Kajander, I. Kuronen, K. Akerman, A. Pelttari, and N. Ciftcioglu, “Nanobacteria from Blood, the Smallest Culturable Autonomously Replicating Agent on Earth,”
Proceedings of the Society for Optical Engineering
no. 3111 (1997): pp. 420–28.

In fact, the lead
• Dick and Strick,
Living Universe,
p. 194, referring to microbiologist Olavi Kajander’s inability to get published before the meteorite controversy focused public attention on the issue of nanobacteria.

But McKay, not
• Author interview with McKay.

Some experts saw
• Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick,
The Living Universe
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 194–95.

People had published
• Analysis of the papers provided by Allan Treiman.

Spurred by the rock
• “Astrobiology Isn’t a Dirty Word Anymore,”
Scientist
(Jan. 19, 2004), p. 44. Goldin became NASA’s longest-serving administrator, resigning in October 2001 with many accomplishments and a few significant failures—the balance tilting in his favor overall, by most assessments. (See W. Henry Lambright,
Transforming Government: Dan Goldin and the Remaking of NASA,
Report for the Pricewaterhouse Coopers Endowment for the Business of Government, March 2001.) In late 2003, Goldin surfaced in the news again when Boston University, in an internal power struggle, paid him $1.8 million to give up his job as its president—before he even started to work there. (See Sara Rimer, “Boston U. Pays Leader to Quit Before Starting,”
New York Times,
Nov. 1, 2003, p. A1; Sara Rimer, “After the Tumult, Boston U. Wonders Where It Goes from Here,”
New York Times,
Nov. 19, 2003, p. B9; and Sara Rimer, “1.8 Million Check for a Job Not Done Jolts Boston University,”
New York Times,
Nov. 6, 2003, p. A29.)

The controversy over
• Author interviews with Goldin and Huntress, who moved from NASA to the Carnegie Institution to be head of the Geophysical Laboratory. See also Dick and Strick,
Living Universe,
p. 195, and “Astrobiology Isn’t a Dirty Word Anymore.” Philosopher of science Carol Cleland said the McKay group’s 1996 claim, “more than anything else, was the birth of astrobiology as a serious subject.” Noting that the meaning of the rock remained in dispute, she said, “it made people realize how easy it could be for life to be happening elsewhere.”

The hostilities unleashed
• This summary of the rock’s ripple effects is drawn from author interviews with numerous scientists on all sides of the controversy. See also Dick and Strick,
Living Universe,
pp. 195, 199, 201. See also interview with Ed Scott, Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, a skeptic on the McKay group claims, “Mars Meteorite’s Link to Life Questioned,” at www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/mars_meteor_020514.htm.

In the persistence
• Science historian Iris Fry cited in Dick and Strick,
Living Universe,
p. 199. (They also cite the “sociology of science” quote, which comes from science historian and philosopher Iris Fry,
The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview
[New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000], p. 221.)

On some far-off day
• Author interviews and lab sessions with McKay. NASA was considering replacing the long-awaited Mars sample return, tentatively scheduled for launch in 2013, with an Astrobiology Field Laboratory to work in place on the surface of Mars, NASA astrobiologist Michael Meyer, newly appointed Mars exploration chief, said in a talk before the D.C. Science Writers Group, Rayburn House Office Building, Oct. 28, 2004. In June 2005, he told the author that a decision between the sample return and the field lab was to be made in early 2006.

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ADDITIONAL SOURCES

For the paper containing the original claims, see: David S. McKay, Everett K. Gibson, Kathie L. Thomas-Keprta, Hojatollah Vali, Chris S. Romanek, Simon J. Clemett, S. D. F. Chillier, C. R. Maechling, Richard N. Zare. “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001,”
Science
273 (August 16, 1996): 924–30.

More information on Martian meteorites is at NASA Johnson Space Center’s Astromaterials Curation Web site; the “Meteorites from Mars” link provides information for the general public (http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/curator/antmet/marsmets/contents.htm); Charles Meyer,
Mars Meteorite Compendium,
NASA/JSC (2001), provides detailed technical/scientific information on the Web at: (http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/curator/antmet/mmc/mmc.htm). For detailed information specific to the Allan Hills meteorite ALH84001, see http://www-curator.jsc.nasa.gov/curator/antmet/mmc/84001.pdf.

More information about some of the events discussed in Chapter Two can be found in NASA’s Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal, at: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.launch.htm.

Information about the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) is at: http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/.

UNPUBLISHED WORK CITED

Transcripts of a series of interviews housed at the NASA headquarters history archives, conducted in 1997 by Steven J. Dick, a space historian and author then at the U.S. Naval Observatory (subsequently NASA’s chief historian). In the interviews, he asked key scientists about astrobiology and the controversy surrounding the Martian meteorite.

Various documents, including e-mails, memos, notes, and rough drafts of press releases provided to the author by participants in the events connected with the Martian meteorite controversy, in addition to a variety of documents contained in NASA archives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A
S A STAFF
writer for
The Washington Post,
I was part of the press pack covering the August 1996 story of a homely rock from Mars as it briefly emerged as a worldwide celebrity and set scientists quarreling over its meaning. Not until four years later, with the dispute still stewing, did I decide to write this book. My goal was to understand how so many dozens of very smart people, armed with the world’s most advanced tools, could argue so fiercely for so long about the meaning of one fist-sized lump—albeit the oldest rock known from any planet including Earth. Why couldn’t somebody win the battle over this tiny chunk of Martian turf?

The answer to that question is the subject of this book. The argument at its heart concerns not only the frustrations of the search for life on Mars but also those bedeviling the effort to understand how life began on Earth and what are the distinguishing characteristics of life wherever it may be found.

I write as a journalist; I am not a scientist or a scholar. For the sake of readability I have left out, or reduced to notes, many people who produced significant work on the rock or were otherwise touched by it. Still, I’ve tried to convey all sides of the case fairly while providing a taste of what cutting-edge research looks like from inside as it unfolds and a sense of the sea of uncertainties in which its practitioners often must swim. I’ve tried to impart an appreciation of the secret drama, the individual yearning, confusion, fear, ambition, obsession, courage, and extraordinary diligence—in fact, the sheer messiness—that may lie behind any of the “discoveries” so glibly summarized (sometimes by me) in the iceberg tips of news reports and textbooks.

My mother, Ruth, has a forty-pound amethyst, a spiked and crenulated object full of violet sparkles, sitting on a velvet pillow the size of a small dog bed inside her comfortable double-wide mobile home near Santa Cruz, California. Early on, she taught my younger sister and me to appreciate rocks. While we were growing up in Tennessee, and on family trips to the national parks, we admired the layering, the granite outcrops exposed in road cuts, the pretty pebbles at our feet when we hiked. We haunted mineral shops around the American West, desert and mountain. The granite beauty of the High Sierra captured my sister, Sharon, and she has lived most of her life there in a log cabin by a lake. All of us have odd rocks strewn around our homes.

So maybe it should not surprise me to find such talismanic powers in a seemingly ordinary object like the Mars rock, when it is inserted somewhere in the mosaic of emerging knowledge these audacious investigators are assembling.

My deepest gratitude goes to
The Washington Post
and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (particularly Doron Weber), whose support made this book possible. Among my many former editors and coworkers at the
Post
who helped in various ways are Jackson Diehl, Leonard Downie, Steve Coll, Liz Spayd, Joel Garreau, Rick Weiss, Rob Stein, David Brown, Guy Gugliotta, Eric Pianin, Shankar Vedantam, Nils Bruzelius, Susan Okie, Ceci Connolly, Paul Richard (and his wife, Deborah), Linton Weeks, Tom Wilkinson, Tom Shroder, Bob Kaiser, Michael Abramowitz, Pat O’Shea, Chris White, and always on the alert at Cape Canaveral, Bill Harwood. And I thank former
Post
editor Peter Osnos, now at Public Affairs in New York, for his wise and classy advice.

I am grateful to the dozens of participants on all sides of the dispute, as well as those observing from a distance, who generously shared their time and insights, and in some cases great chunks of their lives, with me. Some participated in multiple lengthy interviews over a period of years. Special thanks to David and Mary Fae McKay, Everett Gibson, Kathie Thomas-Keprta, Richard Zare, Simon Clemett, Allan Treiman, Andrew Steele, Robbie Score, Ralph Harvey, Bill Schopf, David “Duck” Mittlefehldt, John Rummel, Martin Brasier, Sue Wentworth, Tim McCoy, Wendell Mendell, David Salisbury, Steven Dick, and Carleton Allen; and for the assistance of those who were in the thick of the action at NASA and the White House as the story unfolded, including Wes Huntress, Dan Goldin, Ed Weiler, Michael Meyer, Jim Garvin, Don Savage, Laurie Boeder, Alan Ladwig, and Rick Borchelt; and also to Lynn Rothschild, Kathleen Burton, Bill Jeffs, James Hartsfield, and Cathy Watson at NASA affiliates around the country. My thanks to the NASA history office, including Roger Launius, Jane Odom, and John Hargenrader; and Richard Faust in the NASA library; and to Steven Maran of the American Astronomical Society; John Logsdon of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University; Richard Obermann, senior staff member of the House Science Subcommittee on Space; and Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society.

At the National Science Foundation, my thanks in particular to Scott Borg and my friend and former colleague Curt Suplee, who helped open my eyes to the Antarctic and other wonders. I also want to thank the Carnegie Institution of Washington, especially Maxine Singer, Richard Meserve, Robert Hazen, Susanne Garvey, and Claire Hardy. I owe a special debt to my friend and former editor Boyce Rensberger, director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Fellowship program, for his insights and advice.

I thank my husband, John Atkisson, for his generous assistance and affectionate forbearance during the hair tearing, and I thank a constant muse named Beacon. Loving thanks to the awesome Ruth Weiland, beyond words, and to Sharon Sawyer, whose sharp wit extends even to minerals. For their warm encouragement throughout, I thank Jackie White, Marilyn Elkins, John and Barbara Holum, Bob and Binnie Holum, John and Vicki Thorne, Dick and Dorothy D’Amato, Ruth Pontius, Erica Atkisson, Paul Thompson, Jim and Helen Ashford, the Cones and the Weilands, Greg Giles, Tracy Barrett, Laura Beth, and Patrick, Marguerite, and Teresa. To deserving people I have inadvertently omitted, my apologies.

I am grateful to all those who read some or all of the manuscript and offered expert comment. Any errors remaining are entirely my own.

Finally, the highest praise to Jonathan Karp, my outrageously talented editor at Random House, and his able assistant, Jonathan Jao, who deserve enormous credit for the shaping and polishing of this narrative, and to my energetic agent, Gail Ross, who made it happen.