First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth by Marc Kaufman

Author:Marc Kaufman [Kaufman, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781439130308
Google: VGGVIgezt34C
Amazon: B005GNK93Y
Barnesnoble: B005GNK93Y
Goodreads: 10996829
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

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It was a young but extraordinarily self-confident British microbiologist named Andrew Steele (or “Steelie,” to those who know him) who first made contamination a major issue with Allan Hills 84001. He became involved with the Mars meteorite almost on a lark. Having just earned his doctorate at the University of Portsmouth, in southern England, he contacted McKay’s NASA office soon after announcement of the discovery to say he wanted to get involved and asked for a small sample of the rock. Many others asked for, and received, similar samples, but few with so little experience and in such an informal way. Nonetheless, Steele brought a particular skill and technology to analyzing the sample and helped knock down one of the early criticisms of the McKay paper—that the “microfossil” was simply an artifact of the way McKay’s team had prepared the thin slice of rock for examination. Based on his good work, Steele was invited to a NASA gathering convened in 1997 to discuss future research on Allan Hills 84001 and other Mars meteorites. That Houston meeting instead became an intellectual brawl, with scientists arguing endlessly about the initial article far more than planning any future research. At a key moment, Steele made some levelheaded and insightful comments that organizers of the meeting noticed. Then and there, he was asked to join McKay’s research team. His soon-to-be wife was pregnant at the time in England, but Steele agreed to stay in Texas, and his future brother-in-law was hired as his doctoral student assistant. McKay and his team had already been working on the Martian meteorite for several years and had already published the Science paper before Steele showed up.

Perhaps it was his background as a microbiologist, or perhaps he just knew what to look for and how, but relatively soon after joining the team Steele came to McKay with some troubling news: A new sample of the meteorite that McKay had asked him to study certainly housed the remains of Earthly microbes on the outer crust and also in some cracks opening into the rock. As McKay tells it, the news was unsettling not only because it called into question what might have been “eating” the Mars meteorite and leaving those arguably telltale signs behind, but also because numerous teams of researchers had examined the rock earlier and not found the bugs. One of the teams that had searched for contamination but hadn’t found it was McKay’s—which was universally credited with being careful and rigorous in its research, even if many disagreed with its conclusions. The Steele finding led McKay to set up a Red or “Pro-Life” Team that would search for evidence to support their hypothesis and a Blue or “No-Life” Team that would poke holes in the research.

Steele was, not surprisingly, on the Blue Team, where he helped research and write some papers critical of the original McKay research. He spent only fourteen months with McKay before he left NASA for a dream job (for which he got a strong recommendation from McKay) at the renowned Carnegie Institution in Washington.

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