DID WE FIND MARTIAN LIFE 20 YEARS AGO?

2 Nov 1996
Source: Nando Times

LONDON (Nov 12, 1996 01:01 a.m. EST) -- Life was discovered on Mars 20 years ago, and further evidence is awaiting a new generation of space missions. This is the startling claim of an American scientist intimately involved with a NASA mission which declared the Red Planet sterile 20 years ago.

Dr. Gilbert Levin was one of the principal scientists involved in the Viking mission in 1976. He conducted a key experiment to look for life -- and, he believes, found it.

But, to his dismay, the official consensus that emerged was that Mars had never harbored life. "A number of explanations have been proposed to explain the results of my experiment," Levin, 72, declares. "None of them are convincing. I believe that Mars has life today."

His certainty comes from this year's discovery of what appear to be fossilised microbes in Martian meteorites, hunks of rock which had been flung out of the crust of Mars in the ancient past. And it's hardly surprising. "Life is hardier than we had ever imagined," he says. "Microbes have been found inside nuclear fuel rods inside reactors and in the depths of the ocean where there is no light."

Mars is back on the scientific agenda. The U.S. and Russia are sending a small flotilla of spacecraft to the Red Planet. Last Thursday NASA's Mars Global Surveyor was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral. Next weekend, Russia's Mars '96 will blast off from Kazakhstan. Both will reach the planet next September. In early December, NASA's Pathfinder mission will make a fast track to Mars and -- with impeccable timing -- arrive on Independence Day.

Dr. Levin began his career as a sanitation engineer in California and developed a technique to detect bacteria. Known as the labelled release experiment, he fed a sample of water with a "broth" of radioactive lactose and measured the carbon dioxide produced. Few companies were interested.

Then, at a cocktail party in 1959, he met T. Keith Glennan, then the first head of NASA. "It suddenly struck me that my technique could be adapted and flown to the Red Planet to search for life," Levin says. Glennan told Levin to talk to Nasa's top biologist. Soon, Levin found himself on the Viking biology team.

Earlier forays by the family of Mariner spacecraft showed that Mars was colder, drier and more hostile than had been originally thought. But there was still the chance that microbes lay in the soil. This was how the Viking mission was born.

The Viking spacecraft touched down in 1976, Viking 1 on July 20 and Viking 2 on September 4. A robot arm grabbed soil samples which were fed into a hopper, and then three experiments tried to find signs of metabolism. Dr. Levin's experiment gave a strong signal that there were microbes in the soil, but the other two experiments yielded less certain results. Levin wanted to run a check.

But there were personalities involved. The Viking biology team was openly at war. Indeed, their mutual hostility was featured in two consecutive issues of the New Yorker magazine in 1979.

Levin found things difficult. "It was an uphill struggle for me, because I had gone from being an engineer from a small company, to working with Nobel laureates,' he says. "It had always been proposed that we would work on each other's experiments but we never did." One of the team had already said that he felt that his experiment was compromised by the others.

The supposed clincher that there were no microbes on Mars came from another experiment. The Viking's mass spectrometer found no evidence for organic molecules, long chains based on carbon which form the biochemical backbone of life.

The theory explaining the absence of organic molecules went like this. Because Mars has no ozone layer, there is nothing to protect the surface from dangerous ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Therefore the planet's soils are effectively bleached.

Levin remains frustrated by this notion because he believes that the chemistry is wrong.

The theory says that hydrogen peroxide is produced in the atmosphere on Mars and it trickles down to the surface. The problem is that measurements made from spacecraft in orbit around Mars and the latest telescopes on Earth have yet to find its spectral signature.

In the late Seventies, Levin made another discovery. Looking through the PhD thesis of the student who had developed the mass spectrometer, he realised that both that and his own experiments had analysed the same samples from Antarctica taken as a test before the Viking mission. (Antarctica is the most Mars-like place on our planet and an ideal place to try out life detection experiments.)

Levin was astonished. "The mass spectrometer had tested the same Antarctic samples which we had looked at," he says. "It had found no organics and yet we had found living organisms."

Levin then checked on the sensitivity of each instrument. Although he could find as few as 50 biological cells in a given sample, the mass spectrometer would require upwards of ten million. In other words, the instrument held up as proving there was no life on Mars was much less sensitive than his own. "There was no conflict in the Martian data if you understand the sensitivities," Levin says. Despite his best efforts, Levin could not persuade the mass spectrometer team to check their instrument against his with known samples.

And there the matter has remained. Levin is now an experimenter on an American instrument which will be flown on the Russian Mars '96 mission. The Mars Oxidising Experiment will shed more light on the mysteries of the Martian soil, but it won't be capable of looking at organics.

The answer to Levin is obvious: re-fly a more sensitive version of the labelled release experiment. Despite trying to persuade NASA's current chief, Daniel Goldin, who has asked the scientific community for all its help to solve the riddle of the Martian microbes, his pleas have fallen on deaf ears.


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