Martian Life: The NASA Cover-Up?

Worse was to come. As geologist Bruce Jakosky observes, Mars must be kept topped up by carbon from meteorites. "You find organics on the Moon from meteorites. So something must be breaking apart the organics on Mars. The suggestion that's been pretty much accepted is that there must be oxidising agents, like hydrogen peroxide, in the Martian soil that would attack the organics and break them apart".

We go over this ground with Gil Levin. He takes some papers out of a filing cabinet, and places a computer print-out on the table. To our eyes, the Mars data does not look like a chemical reaction. Chemical activity builds rapidly, then dies away. But the Martian curve builds steadily, and looks identical to his terrestrial controls.

Levin had one last-ditch attempt to convince NASA that he was onto something. He decided to heat samples of Mars soil within a narrow range of temperatures - the range of temperatures that kill off bacteria on the Earth. "First of all, we showed that 51 degrees definitely destroyed the signal. But secondly, we showed that 46 degrees didn't destroy it - it inhibited it by 30 percent. And that's just the way that in the laboratory here we distinguish E. coli from the rest of the coliforms, because E. coli can survive beyond 37 degrees, while the others cannot".

CREDIT: Hencoup Enterprises At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Danny Glavin perfects the ultimate equipment for discovering the merest traces of amino acids - the building blocks of life.

It was all to no avail. NASA had turned its collective back on Levin. "It was political", he acknowledges. "They had to come down with a decision, and they hate to retract a decision. If you go to people from NASA and you say, what do you think of the Labelled Release Experiment, they'll say - oh, that's garbage you know. Levin keeps saying the same thing over and over again".

"In 1986, I was asked to speak at the tenth anniversary of Viking, and what I did was list, oh, maybe fifteen possible explanations of a non-biological nature for the Labelled Release Experiment results - and I showed errors in each one of those. And for the very first time, I said, it's my opinion that it's more probable than not that the Labelled Release Experiment detected life on Mars. There was an uproar. Since then, I've been essentially ostracised by the NASA-supported community".

But amongst Mars researchers around the world we have felt a tide beginning to turn - away from the official NASA line. At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, we spoke to young chemists Danny Glavin and Oliver Botta. Their field is detecting the chemicals of life - and now they hope to take their techniques, tried and tested on Earth, to Mars. "We've recently done some really interesting experiments with this new Mars Organic Detector, the MOD," Glavin enthuses.