The Rock From Mars (49 page)

Broadbent and her
• Author interview with Broadbent; Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” p. 24. Regarding Sagan’s participation as reviewer, see also William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara,
Mars
(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2001), pp. 295–98, and William Poundstone,
Carl Sagan
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999) p. 379.

From as early as
• Hartsfield e-mail, July 17, 1996.

Because of the sensational
• Author interview with Don Savage; Savage memo; see also Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” p. 23. Savage first contacted
Science
on July 17 to discuss the paper’s publication date. On July 22, according to his memo, he participated in a teleconference with NASA headquarters officials Wes Huntress, Laurie Boeder, Edward Weiler, Jergen Rahe, and Joe Boyce; with Johnson Space Center’s David McKay, Everett Gibson, public affairs officers James Hartsfield, Steve Nesbitt, and Jeff Carr; and with
Science
editor Brooks Hansen and public affairs official Diane Dondershine, to continue the planning. The next day,
Science
decided that the earliest possible publication date would be August 16.

On the subject of leaks
• Author interviews with Savage and Boeder; Savage memo.

When things later went
• Author interviews with Broadbent, Boeder, Savage, Goldin, and others involved.

Early on Terrible Tuesday
• Author interview with Broadbent. Among the others involved in the action at
Science
that day were Broadbent’s assistant, Diane Dondershine, and managing editor Monica Bradford.

The magazine was now
• Author interviews with Broadbent and Boeder.

She understood that the
• Author interview with Boeder.

The agency’s DNA
• National Space Act of 1958 (since amended).

The next thing Nan
• Author interviews with Broadbent, Goldin, Huntress, Savage, and others.

The AP’s Paul Recer
• Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” p. 26; author interviews with Broadbent and Savage.

The
Science
staff
• Author interview with Broadbent; Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” pp. 26–27. After Borchelt supported Broadbent’s decision, Boeder subsequently refused to take Borchelt’s calls.

A horde of relentless
• The author was working on unrelated projects at her desk in the
Washington Post
newsroom when a flurry of phone calls and the AP dispatch alerted her. She and her editor, Curt Suplee, were part of the “horde” pressing for release of the meteorite paper.

They ended up having
• Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” p. 20.

Keeping the secret
• Author interview with Zare; Zare’s written account.

A film crew from
• Author interviews with Zare and Salisbury.

Salisbury fended them
• In advance of the planned press conference (which had now been moved up), Zare had gone to Condoleezza Rice, then provost of Stanford, to secure permission for Salisbury to accompany him to Washington, Zare told the author. When he told Rice the press conference would be about possible life on Mars and swore her to secrecy, he said, the future U.S. secretary of state seemed remarkably “unflapped.”

He was also appalled
• Author interview with Zare; Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” pp. 28–29.

At around three-thirty
• Author interviews with Zare, Salisbury, and Broadbent; Zare’s written account; Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,” p. 29.

During the flight
• Author interview with Zare; Zare’s written account.

A few weeks earlier
• J. William Schopf,
Cradle of Life
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 306.

Goldin and his top
• Author interviews with Goldin, Huntress, and others.

Schopf soon realized
• Schopf,
Cradle of Life,
pp. 305–6.

Arriving at NASA
• Author interviews with Goldin, McKay, Boeder, Savage, and others; see also Schopf,
Cradle of Life,
p. 307–9. There was another unexpected attendee, according to several who were present that day. NASA officials expressed surprise at the arrival of Hojatollah Vali and were not sure what role to give him. Vali ended up sitting at the dais, but he did not say a word during the press conference. By all accounts, including that of Vali himself in an interview with the author, it was a bit awkward.

First thing in that
• Author interview with Weiler. No one in the room that day took the trouble to introduce Schopf to Weiler or others present, Schopf told the author in an e-mail, May 6, 2005. Except for the McKay group and chief exobiologist Michael Meyer, Schopf said, “I had no idea who any of these folks were.”

Events had led Weiler
• Astrophysicist Weiler, chief of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope science team, had led the demoralized Hubble team through months of ridicule, after the revelation that the observatory had been launched with a serious flaw, and on to the successful astronaut repair job in space. Weiler would subsequently become director of NASA’s new Origins initiative, NASA’s chief space scientist, and in 2004, director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Schopf was not the
• Author interviews with Savage and other participants.

Some of those on
• Author interviews with Weiler, Boeder, and others.

Schopf gave his
• Schopf,
Cradle of Life,
pp. 307–9. In an e-mail to the author, May 6, 2005, Schopf conceded that he might have misremembered the precise wording but insisted that the import was the same: Boeder wanted them to be “more positive.” At least two scientists in the room that day remember Goldin and/or Boeder telling members of the McKay group not to “wimp out.”

She had been arguing
• Author interview with Boeder.

As Weiler would recall
• Author interview with Weiler. McKay, when asked about the incident, would say he never felt anyone was pressuring him to change the content of his presentation, to say his findings were more certain than they actually were. He did feel pressure to improve his delivery.

CHAPTER NINE:
in the beam

Chris Romanek was
• Author interviews with Romanek provided the basis for this account of his wild dash to Washington for the press conference.

A pumped Dan Goldin
• David Salisbury, draft of feature article, August 8, 1996.

The countdown was
• The author attended the press conference and also interviewed all the main participants. See also videotape and transcript of the event (NASA archives).

But first, the
• Transcript of comments by President Clinton, August 7, 1996, 1:15
P
.
M
., South Lawn of the White House (http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/clinton.htm). White House science office staff member Rick Borchelt told the author that adviser Dick Morris had urged the president to issue a statement the day before, when the story first began to break, but Borchelt and others had persuaded Clinton to wait until the story jelled. Hollywood would later incorporate a portion of Clinton’s real-life Rose Garden commentary into the movie
Contact
(based on a 1985 novel by Carl Sagan). The director would make it seem as if the president was talking about the first radio signal received from an intelligent alien civilization.

Here is the complete transcript of the President’s words:

President Clinton Statement Regarding Mars Meteorite Discovery

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

August 7, 1996

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT

UPON DEPARTURE

The South Lawn

1:15
P
.
M
. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon. I’m glad to be joined by my science and technology adviser, Dr. Jack Gibbons, to make a few comments about today’s announcement by NASA.

This is the product of years of exploration and months of intensive study by some of the world’s most distinguished scientists. Like all discoveries, this one will and should continue to be reviewed, examined, and scrutinized. It must be confirmed by other scientists. But, clearly, the fact that something of this magnitude is being explored is another vindication of America’s space program and our continuing support for it, even in these tough financial times. I am determined that the American space program will put its full intellectual power and technological prowess behind the search for further evidence of life on Mars.

First, I have asked Administrator Goldin to ensure that this finding is subject to a methodical process of further peer review and validation. Second, I have asked the Vice President to convene at the White House before the end of the year a bipartisan space summit on the future of America’s space program. A significant purpose of this summit will be to discuss how America should pursue answers to the scientific questions raised by this finding. Third, we are committed to the aggressive plan we have put in place for robotic exploration of Mars. America’s next unmanned mission to Mars is scheduled to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center in November. It will be followed by a second mission in December. I should tell you that the first mission is scheduled to land on Mars on July the 4th, 1997—Independence Day.

It is well worth contemplating how we reached this moment of discovery. More than 4 billion years ago this piece of rock was formed as a part of the original crust of Mars. After billions of years it broke from the surface and began a 16-million-year journey through space that would end here on Earth. It arrived in a meteor shower 13,000 years ago. And in 1984 an American scientist on an annual U.S. government mission to search for meteors on Antarctica picked it up and took it to be studied. Appropriately, it was the first rock to be picked up that year—rock number 84001. [Actually, it was the first to be
analyzed
that year.]

Today, rock 84001 speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental.

We will continue to listen closely to what it has to say as we continue the search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our people’s future.

Thank you.

When the cameras
• As the press conference began, the space agency’s sound system let out a high-pitched feedback keen, like an irate stepped-on cat. Goldin opened the proceedings by vowing not to fire anyone for the sound-system glitch.

Wes Huntress, Goldin’s
• For the published paper, see D. S. McKay, E. K. Gibson Jr., K. L. Thomas-Keprta, H. Vali, C. S. Romanek, S. J. Clemett, X. D. F. Chillier, C. R. Maechling, and R. N. Zare, “Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001,”
Science
(Aug. 16, 1996): pp. 924–30.

McKay concluded with
• McKay et al., “Search for Past Life.” See also T. Stevens and J. McKinley, “Lithoautotrophic Microbial Ecosystems in Deep Basalt Aquifers,”
Science
(Oct. 20, 1995); and Michael Ray Taylor,
Dark Life
(New York: Scribner, 1999), pp. 96–97. A selection of comparison images—Earth and Mars—could be found at the following site as of early 2005: http://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/astrobiology/biomarkers/images.htm.

As recounted in
Dark Life,
Todd Stevens, a microbial ecologist, had left some of his Columbia River samples with Thomas-Keprta. Anne Taunton, an intern working for McKay and Thomas-Keprta, studied one of them in the summer of 1996 (although she had been kept in the dark about the Mars rock hypothesis). When she boosted the magnification, she found the rock “packed with discrete colonies of fossilized rods and filaments. Some of the apparent bugs were only 30 or 40 nanometers in diameter and 150 nanometers long,” well below the standard size range for bacteria. When she delivered the photos of these shapes, Kathie Thomas-Keprta stared at them and said, “This is just what we needed. Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe it.” She even asked Taunton to cancel a planned trip. Taunton went to McKay and insisted that he tell her what was going on. He pulled out one of his own microscope images of wormlike rods resembling the ones she had found in the Columbia River basalt. “Umm, that one’s from Mars,” McKay told her. She was thrilled when McKay displayed her Columbia River sample images at the press conference. Stevens, even though he had provided the samples and written the earlier paper, remained skeptical of the nanobacteria theory.

While the other scientists
• Zare’s written account and interviews with author; also e-mail from Schopf to author, May 6, 2005. A few months after the press conference, Schopf said, he and Zare had a friendly chat at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. As Schopf recalled, “I explained to him about the problems with the potential origins of the organics [the PAHs] he had reported. He told me that had he known [this information earlier], he never would have been a coauthor [on the McKay group’s
Science
paper]. Following that, to his credit, [Zare] declined the opportunity to coauthor works with the group.”

Zare remembered the incident differently. Zare said he did not regret coauthoring the paper or renounce Zarelab’s findings on the organics. But he did say he was disappointed that it was only during this encounter with Schopf that he learned for the first time about Schopf’s earlier visit to Johnson Space Center and the reservations he expressed to the McKay group about its fledgling biological hypothesis. McKay and company had neglected to tell him. “That bothered me,” Zare said. “But I’ve never disowned the paper. In retrospect, of course, you’d express a number of things in different ways.”

Zare said that he had also been put off by what he saw as too little skepticism, “too much strong belief” on the part of some members of the McKay team, notably Everett Gibson, that “what they were doing had to be right.”

While there had been various scenarios proposed for the origins of the PAHs in the rock, in Zare’s view that remained a mystery. “To this day, I don’t know what they’re coming from.”

Zare said he had declined to sign the papers produced by the Houston group after 1996 not because of anything Bill Schopf had told him but “because the work on the magnetites wasn’t mine. It was their work. I gave them advice. I cheered them on.” In their work published later on the magnetites, the McKay group thanked Zare for his help.

Evidence of the rock’s
• Ralph P. Harvey and Harry McSween Jr., “A Possible High-Temperature Origin for the Carbonates in the Martian Meteorite ALH84001,”
Nature
(July 4, 1996): pp. 49–51.

In the months and
• Author interviews with McKay; see also William Sheehan and Stephen James O’Meara,
Mars
(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2001), p. 295, regarding Sagan’s role.

By early on August 7
• Vincent Kiernan, “Mars Meteorite,”
Public Understanding of Science,
vol. 9 (2000): p. 33, citing AAAS 1996 Annual Report; author interviews with
Science
staff.

NASA’s Web site scored
• Ibid., 32–33, citing weekly report of the NASA public affairs office.

Despite the unmannerly
• Ibid., pp. 29–35.

Regardless of the content
• J. William Schopf,
Cradle of Life
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 324.

An auction house in
•
New York Times,
Oct. 31, 1996, p. D6. And
USA Today,
Nov. 21, 1996, reported that, at the November 20 auction, the top bid of $1.1 million for a set of three Martian specimens failed to meet the minimum set by the unidentified seller.

The iconic seventy-five-year-old
• David Culton, “Author of Mars Novel Skeptical of NASA’s Claims,” Gannett News Service, Aug. 8, 1996.

Microsoft’s chief strategic
• Nathan Myhrvold, “Mars to Humanity: Get Over Yourself,”
Slate,
Aug. 14, 1996; summarized in
Time
(August 26, 1996): p. 64.

Back at Building 31
• Author interview with the Smithsonian’s Tim McCoy, who was working in Building 31 at the time.

Everybody connected with
• Author interview with Gibson, regarding the statistics. Also in interviews with the author, David McKay and Mary Fae McKay described their participation in a special program on the Mars rock for the Discovery Channel. The cameras followed David to work, and came to the McKay home to capture the family fixing dinner, including David chopping mushrooms for his signature “roast on a grill” from a Presbyterian cookbook.

Gibson would do more
• Author interview with Gibson. One occasion especially impressed Gibson: he and his wife were walking down a London street after he had given a TV interview when a woman came up to him, reached out, and grabbed his collar, saying, “You’re the Mars man!”

The rock also helped
• Morris’s resignation caused an embarrassing distraction for the president just hours before the session of the Democratic convention where he accepted his party’s unanimous nomination for a second term. Morris would acknowledge his bad behavior in a memoir,
Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties
(New York: Random House, 1997).

CHAPTER TEN:
schopf shock

In the summer of
• Schopf described the China trip in a lecture at Goddard Space Flight Center, May 4, 2001; see also J. William Schopf,
Cradle of Life
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 201–7.

One day, Schopf
• Schopf,
Cradle of Life,
p. 204.

His hosts could not
• In an e-mail to the author, Schopf dismissed the appellation “god of the Precambrian,” used by some of his colleagues, calling it overblown.

The encounter would
• Regarding the practical separation of the fields of planetary sciences and origin of life studies, see Steven J. Dick,
The Biological Universe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 473–502.

In 1960, as an
• Schopf,
Cradle of Life,
pp. 52–53.

Scientists had found
• Ibid., p. 29. In the early 1900s, Charles Doolittle Walcott discovered the best-preserved Cambrian fauna in a formation in the Canadian Rockies; he called it the Burgess shale. It would be celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould’s best-seller,
Wonderful Life
(New York: Norton, 1989).

The skeptics had
• Schopf,
Cradle of Life,
pp. 72–75.

In 1961, just as
• Ibid., pp. 183, 193–95. Though stromatolites had peppered the surface of the young Earth, they eventually became rare, because other life
did
evolve. Snails, for example, found the mat builders quite tasty. Shark Bay and a few other spots were too salty for the predators, thereby providing protected habitats where stromatolite populations could survive.

Schopf was troubled by
• Ibid., chapter 1, especially p. 34. Another reason it took so long for doubts to be resolved about the true nature of stromatolites was the chasm between geologists and microbiologists. The latter had shown years earlier that bacterial communities indeed built formations layered in squishy or leathery rather than stony material. The microbiologists called these things bacterial mats, but they were quite similar to stromatolites. As Schopf would write, the two tribes—geologists and microbiologists—barely spoke the same language and “on most college campuses they even occupy separate ‘homelands’ . . . and as each prods its students to learn more and more about less and less, science becomes increasingly fragmented.”