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From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose)
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 1998 05:42:02 +0100
Fwd Date: Sat, 04 Apr 1998 09:04:42 -0500
Subject: Mars Life Theory Gains Momentum
>From the Boston Globe March 21. URL:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe/globehtml/080/Mars_life_theory_gains_mo
mentum.htm
Stig
*******
Mars life theory gains momentum
By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff, 03/21/98
HOUSTON - The case for life on Mars - albeit in the very distant
past - was strengthened yesterday by a new report that a Martian
meteorite contains crystalline traces of living organisms.
The assertion that the meteorite from Mars shows evidence of
life, first ventured by a team of scientists in 1996, remains
controversial.
But no evidence has refuted it, and new findings make it more
difficult to find a nonbiological explanation, several scientists
said.
The most significant new evidence is that the rock, which was
found in Antarctica in 1984, contains crystals of magnetite - a
magnetic mineral produced by many terrestrial bacteria - that
have a shape only found in magnetite produced by living
organisms.
While magnetite grains can easily be produced by nonliving
chemical processes, none of those have ever been found to have
the six-sided columnar shape, called a parallelopiped, seen in
these grains, said Kathie Thomas-Keprta, a coauthor of the
original paper reporting evidence of life in the Martian
meteorite.
"We found a variety" of shapes of magnetite crystals in the
meteorite, known as ALH 84001, Thomas-Keprta said. But the
unusual hexagonal forms, she said, "are produced by bacteria in
anaerobic [oxygen-free] environments. We don't know of any
nonbiological process" that can produce such shapes, she said.
Magnetite crystals found in the Mars meteorite match those found
in microbes on Earth "in size, shape, chemistry, and the lack of
structural defects," she said.
One of her coauthors on the new research, Dennis Bazylinski, has
been doing research on the magnetite grains in microbes for 20
years, she said, and has never found any such forms being
produced nonbiologically. The unusual crystals appear in such
quantities, Thomas-Keprta said, that she stopped counting after
she documented over 100 of them.
The findings were reported at the annual Lunar and Planetary
Science conference held at the Johnson Space Center.
John Bradley, a geochemist, suggested that there is a way to
produce such shapes chemically through vapor deposition. But
David McKay, a Johnson Space Center researcher and lead author of
the original Mars meteorite paper, said there is no evidence of
that in scientific literature, and questioned whether a
high-temperature vapor deposition process would have any
relevance to this case anyway, since most scientists agree that
the shapes in the Mars meteorite formed at low temperatures.
"We think that's our strongest evidence," McKay said of the new
magnetite research. And unlike some other possible signs of life
that critics have said might be contamination that entered the
rock on Earth, the magnetite grains are incorporated in the rock
and clearly came from Mars.
In 14 talks and dozens of poster presentations at the conference,
scientists on both sides of the contentious debate over the
significance of the Martian meteorite presented their latest
results, but none appeared to significantly undermine the
original assertions of possible biological remains in the rock.
Several other presentations added ammunition to support the claim
that tiny cell-like shapes found in the Mars rock may be fossils
of ancient microbial life. While many biologists have questioned
whether it is possible for a living organism to be as tiny as the
fossils, numerous researchers have now found living microbes on
Earth that are comparable in size.
Several of these tiny organisms, sometimes called nanofossils,
have been found in water from thermal springs at Yellowstone
National Park and at Hot Springs, Ark., among other places.
Several recent scientific papers have suggested that carbon
compounds found in the rock, which are held up as part of the
evidence of signs of past life, were actually contamination that
entered the rock after it landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago.
But Simon Clemett, a biochemist at Stanford University, showed
that some of the compounds found in the meteorite have very
different chemical characteristics from those found in Antarctic
ice. While there undoubtedly has been some contamination, he
said, it is possible to distinguish the terrestrial compounds
from those that apparently were there already.
The important thing, McKay emphasized, is to be able to
distinguish the different kinds of compounds so that laboratory
analysis can concentrate on the extraterrestrial components.
Everett Gibson, another Johnson Space Center researcher who was
part of the original team that analyzed the meteorite, concluded,
"There's still no smoking gun, but there's no bullet holes put in
our hypothesis."
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 03/21/98.
=A9Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
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