A Brief History of Creation (30 page)

When he arrived back in the United States, Lederberg immediately set about trying to establish a toehold in the nascent American space program. Within a month, he had circulated two memos throughout the National Academy of Sciences discussing the potential for a new “cosmic microbiology” and “lunar biology.” Lederberg was advocating that the scientific search for the origin of life be extended to the space program as a search for life on other planets. Finding life in space would have important implications for the scientists trying to discover the origin of life on Earth. As a bacteriologist, Lederberg posed his suggestions as a matter of national security. He worried that the first life human beings would encounter in space would be bacterial and potentially very dangerous, capable of wreaking devastation much the way the introduction of bacteria from Eurasia had once devastated native populations in the wake of Columbus's voyage to America, an idea that Lederberg popularized in an article entitled “Moondust” that he wrote for
Science
.

Lederberg's suggestions grabbed the attention of Hugh Dryden, who was emerging as one of the most important figures in America's rapidly expanding space program. In July of 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA. Dryden was named the deputy administrator, and one of his first acts was to set up a Space Sciences Board to advise the new agency. Lederberg was named to
head a panel on extraterrestrial life. From his new position, and with the enormous funding of the space program to draw upon, Lederberg began to attract some of the leading names in origin-of-life research, such as Harold Urey, Berkeley's Melvin Calvin, and Stanley Miller, who was already speculating about the possible presence of life on other planets. Lederberg also began snatching up some of the most promising young minds in the field.

One of the men Lederberg recruited was a young astrophysicist named Carl Sagan, who had been a student of Urey's at the University of Chicago when Miller conducted his electrical discharge experiment. Sagan quickly became one of the most enthusiastic embracers of the space program, and he carried his enthusiasm for understanding the origin of life with him when he left Chicago. His unique knack for popularizing science was apparent almost from the beginning—something that Lederberg and his coterie of scientists would benefit from in the years to come.

By 1959, the term “exobiology” had begun to appear in Lederberg's private letters to describe the way in which the search for the origin of life on Earth could be used to hunt for life in outer space. The term caught on quickly. But at its root, the work always remained focused, ultimately, on the search for the origin of life on Earth. As Carl Sagan later wrote, exobiology was nothing more than “extending [Stanley] Miller's results to astronomy.”

At the start of the 1950s, research into the origin of life was pitifully underfunded and neglected at universities. The Miller-Urey experiment had come about only by what Miller later called “bootlegging” funds marked for other research. They staged the whole experiment for less than a thousand dollars. But by the early 1960s, research into the origin of life had begun to draw on the seemingly bottomless pockets of the American space program. As early as 1959, money began to pour in for work on instruments to detect life on other worlds. Twenty years after it was created, NASA was easily the world's largest funder of origin-of-life research in the world.

One of the first to receive a grant was Wolf Vishniac, a microbiologist and exobiologist at Yale Medical School, who received funding for a device to detect microorganisms present in the soil of other planets. He
named his device the “Wolf Trap.” In the coming decades, scientists from the exobiology program would be instrumental in the
Apollo
missions to the moon, and central to the
Viking
missions to Mars. They went on to produce important new theories, such as the Gaia hypothesis and the grim potential climatic effects of a “nuclear winter” resulting from atomic warfare. And as they searched for signs of life on other planets, they continued to take important steps toward understanding just how life arose on Earth.

That understanding was about to change in some very fundamental ways. Just a few weeks after the results of the Miller-Urey experiment were published, a team of scientists in Great Britain would tease apart the molecular structure of DNA, a discovery that, in the years to come, was going to upend everything that scientists believed about the mechanisms of biological inheritance. The search for the origin of life—and even the most basic understanding of how life was constructed—was about to undergo a major revolution. Much of it would play out among the scientists affiliated with the NASA exobiology program.

*
The presence of methane gas in Mars's atmosphere would be confirmed in 2009 by NASA scientist Michael Mumma. Like Urey, Mumma was raised in the United Brethren Church, which had tried to discourage his pursuit of science.

†
Author note from H. James Cleaves II: As a graduate student, I was lucky enough to have had Miller as my PhD adviser at UC San Diego. He was extraordinarily kind to those he worked with, but never shy in his criticisms of those he disagreed with. He was also fearless in the lab. I was asked to repeat Miller's experiment for an event celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Miller had by that time suffered a stroke and was unable to explain the details of its execution. It took several weeks to figure out the details, and when the time came to flip the switch, Miller insisted on being present, along with some of his close friends. I was terribly worried some air might have entered the apparatus. My hope was to have everyone, including myself stand out in the hallway, connect a long extension cord to the Tesla coil, and flip the switch from a safe distance. Stanley would have none of it. I winced as I turned it on, fearing an explosion accompanied by shards of glass flying everywhere. Instead, I heard the faint buzzing sound of the spark jumping between the electrodes. We then all got our faces up quite close to the flask and were mesmerized by little wisps of condensation swirling around the spark, looking something like fog tumbling down the hills on the San Francisco Peninsula when it rolls in late in the afternoon.

THE NUCLEIC ACID MONOPOLY

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule
.

—LEWIS THOMAS,
The Medusa and the Snail
, 1969

 

N
EIL ARMSTRONG SAT
in the command module of the
Apollo 11
spacecraft and stared out the window at the surface of the moon. It had been three days since the mission launched from Earth, and the ship was now settled in orbit 60 miles above the moon, awaiting the moment when Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would enter the landing module
Eagle
and begin their descent to the first extraterrestrial surface upon which a human being would ever stand.

Below them lay a vast, bluish-tinted basin filled with hardened lava formed by ancient volcanic eruptions. It was the
Mare Tranquillitatis
, so named by the seventeenth-century Italian Jesuits Francesco Grimaldi and Giovanni Riccioli. The first map of it had appeared in Riccioli's great almanac of astronomy, the
Almagestum novum
, in 1661. Misled by its color, the Italians had mistaken the basin for a sea.

The
Apollo 11
astronauts simply called the
Mare Tranquillitatis
by its English translation, the “Sea of Tranquility.” When they returned from the moon, they planned to bring a sample of it back with them to be studied by geologists and life scientists from NASA's exobiology program. For the American public, simply landing on the moon would be enough. But
for NASA scientists, especially the origin-of-life scientists in the exobiology program, the prospect of being able to study pieces of the moon was immeasurably enticing.

Apollo 11
was the fifth manned space flight undertaken by the US space program. The previous mission,
Apollo 10
, had been a dress rehearsal for the lunar landing that Armstrong and his fellow astronauts were about to attempt. Lunar probes launched from
Apollo 10
had taken detailed photographs of potential landing sites. NASA scientists had combed over the pictures, searching for the ideal landing spot for the next mission.
Apollo 11
would be following an orbit that was roughly in line with the moon's equator, so the landing spot had to be near enough to its trajectory that the landing craft would have sufficient fuel to make its descent. But they also wanted to choose a site with a wealth of geological features. Armstrong and Aldrin would have precious little time on the surface, and they were about to undertake what would amount to the most important geological survey in history. Even if everything went like clockwork, they would have just a little over two hours to gather as much of the moon's geological diversity as they could.

Evidence of past volcanic activity was enticing to the mission planners for the same reasons it had been enticing to men like Charles Darwin. The lava could preserve things that wouldn't otherwise be found in normal rock formations. But the same volcanic formations that were so attractive to scientists back on Earth presented a challenge to the astronauts. One of the biggest dangers posed by the mission would be planting a fragile landing craft safely on the surface. The Sea of Tranquility represented a compromise. Despite its geological promise, the region wasn't overwhelmingly mountainous, making it a relatively attractive site for the astronauts to land.

Armstrong spent most of the trip to the moon poring over maps of the region. Now that they were comfortably in orbit, he could make out its features with his own eyes. With the moon now standing directly between
Columbia
and the sun, the landscape was bathed in a blue
glow of light reflected off the Earth. Craters were clearly defined, almost three-dimensional in the earthshine. Aldrin was the first to make out the 3-mile-wide crater that marked their landing site. It looked rugged and ill suited for landing, as if the planners back at mission control, in their desire to acquire a good geological haul, had been too daring. But as the area gradually came under the direct light of the sun, it began to look less foreboding.

The next day, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed aboard the
Eagle
, leaving the third member of the crew, Michael Collins, behind in command of
Columbia
. Their descent from orbit was problematic. The computer's alarms sounded twice—the result of a hardware malfunction—and Armstrong had to take early manual control of the landing. As they flew closer to the site, they were dismayed to see that the area was strewn with boulders. That would no doubt please the geologists on Earth, but Armstrong knew it would make for a tricky landing. Nonetheless, he managed to skillfully guided the
Eagle
just 350 feet above a large cluster of rocks, touching down near a crater the size of a football field, big enough to pose an obstacle but too small to have been spotted on the maps made by
Apollo 10
. NASA personnel back at mission control in Houston waited in silence, knowing that the astronauts were in the middle of the most dangerous phase of the mission. Then they heard Neil Armstrong speak the first words ever spoken on the moon: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The
Eagle
has landed.”

After a rest of about 2 hours, Armstrong and Aldrin began suiting up in the bulky space suits that had been designed for their moonwalk. Armstrong then descended down a ladder, flipping on a camera that had been mounted on the side of the ship. As he reached the bottom rung, he began to examine the surface. In training, he had been grilled to describe everything for the benefit of the scientists back at NASA. “The surface appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it,” he said. “It's almost like a powder.”

He hopped onto the surface and took a few steps. Some 240,000 miles away, most of America and much of the world sat breathlessly watching on
television or listening on radios.
^*
While sitting in the
Eagle
shortly after its touchdown, Armstrong had thought of what he would say when the historic moment arrived: “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Without his suit, Armstrong would have died in seconds. Yet he was struck by the serenity of the scene that confronted him. The rising sun bathed the moonscape in bright light. It looked different from the pictures he had seen from the probes, and the lack of an atmosphere gave everything a clarity he had never experienced on the Earth. It was beautiful, if stark. Aldrin called it “magnificent desolation.”

Armstrong began snapping pictures from a camera built into his space suit, but stopped when he was interrupted by a voice from mission control urging him to get on with his real work. They were in the middle of the most important geological survey in history, and it would have to be completed in the roughly two and a half hours the astronauts had before their supply of oxygen began to run out.