The Rock From Mars (15 page)

The orangey carbonate blobs must have formed on Mars, because they were cracked in ways that could not have occurred when the rock hit Earth. The carbon in them bore the distinct isotopic signature of the Martian atmosphere, and the oxygen isotopes suggested the carbonates had been deposited in warm, wet conditions. The Oreo rims bore the mineral signatures of both oxidization (including rusting) and its opposite (known as reduction). The formations would require extreme conditions if produced nonbiologically, but were common on Earth as a consequence of biological activity. When the hypothetical organisms died, their decomposition could have produced the greasy organic residue—the PAHs. And in some cases (perhaps), just as fossils form in limestone on Earth, their remains could have been sculpted in those provocative mineral shapes, visible only under a powerful electron beam and eerily similar (the team thought) to the fossilized remains of Earth bacteria; even their incredibly small size was almost the same as those controversial, hypothetical, but provocative terrestrial nanofossils.

But there was no smoking gun.

The McKay team knew there were other plausible story lines for the rock that did not involve biology. They found the biological explanation by far the simplest and most elegant and therefore the best. It was Occam’s razor.

At least some of the people whose names would be on the paper—there were nine—had been feeling the emotional shear of almost unbearable bottled-up excitement alternating with a kind of gut-fluttering dread. This would not be the first time somebody had announced the discovery of possible signs of life in a meteorite. And on each earlier occasion, the evidence had turned out to be some kind of Earth contamination or, worse, an illusion born of unchecked desire. The stomping grounds of science were littered with the embarrassed and ruined career carcasses of those who had dared to make claims about extraterrestrial life, or about ancient Earth fossils. The collaborators knew they might well reap a harvest of humiliation from the very people whose good opinion they most coveted.

Or their work might change the way people regard their place in the universe.

At least by publishing, they could end the secrecy and move on to the next essential step in the dance: a squad of their most skilled counterparts, many of them rivals for the same prize, would get a crack at proving McKay et al. wrong.

The secrecy itself was becoming unpleasant—and impossible.

McKay and the others had several reasons for hiding their results. They knew that dozens of other groups were studying pieces of the rock. They didn’t want to start talking openly about what they were seeing, thereby attracting others to follow the same line. They didn’t intend to get “scooped,” as McKay put it.

Then there was the turf problem. Within the NASA family, Ames Research Center in California, not far from Stanford and Zarelab, was the traditional stronghold for research on extraterrestrial life. The tack the McKay group was pursuing in Houston was a cross-border intrusion. The McKay group wanted to marshal as much evidence as current technology allowed before they showed their hand.

They also knew that if they let the putative aliens out of the bag prematurely, they would blow their chances of getting their paper published in
Science,
the most prestigious platform for announcing their claims. The journal famously—and to the outrage of some scientists—insisted on exclusivity.

In Palo Alto, the ever-ebullient Zare found the ordeal of silence excruciating. When he was involved in something this exciting, he told the world. But, for once, he thought the stakes were high enough to justify a different strategy.

He did occasionally try to communicate some of his feelings about being part of all of this to a few trusted confidants. He tried to talk it out with his wife and daughters one night over dinner. He sputtered on for a while. “Okay, Dad,” sighed young Bethany, unimpressed. “Could you just pass the ketchup.”

For the group in Building 31 in Houston, their clandestine behavior was getting so obvious it was straining their relations with coworkers. Things were getting awkward. At this point, they had shared the information with only the minimum number of people they deemed necessary and politic. A year earlier, they had briefed Carolyn Huntoon, director of Johnson Space Center, and two or three others in the complex. Huntoon was a biochemist, and after seeing some of the images, she thought the whole idea was really “out there.” Knowing McKay and Gibson to be men of integrity, she told them to keep working—but she also directed them to seek outside expertise. After all, she knew, anybody could overlook something, add two plus two and get five.

But the group had not told even colleagues who worked essentially next door. They tried not to make a big deal out of it. When developments warranted, the four of them—McKay, Gibson, Thomas, and Romanek—would meet in one of their offices to talk. If someone wandered in, they would simply change the subject. They kept track of their work in lab notebooks and, when nearing publication, tried to make sure not to forget telltale papers in the copy machines or anywhere else. When leaving their desks, they would turn those papers over. There had always been an atmosphere of trust along these corridors.

Outside the cone of silence, coworkers around them at the space center began to get suspicious and resentful. There was a mounting buzz around the project. Everybody knew that there were signs of water flow in the rock, and that the rock was extraordinarily old and had other special properties. As a visiting scientist working near the group would say later, he considered it “the worst-kept secret at the space center.” As you walked by Kathie Thomas’s desk on any given day, there would be a stack of papers lying there on topics such as biological interactions with minerals, or microbial life. And some colleagues could not help noticing the visit by Bill Schopf, god of the Precambrian, and the huddles with Vali, an expert on microbial life. So there was gossip that the group might be poised to make some kind of public gesture toward the possibility of biology on Mars. Almost no one anticipated that it would be the dominant thrust of their analysis.

An odd breach almost occurred in the spring of 1996. At the Kinko’s a few blocks from the space center, employee Erin O’Shey, twenty-six, was jarred out of her sleepy routine one day when a man and a woman came into the shop with a half dozen photographs they wanted to photocopy in color. They seemed nervous and unusually concerned about the quality of the reproductions and kept all the rejects in hand, instead of throwing them away.

As O’Shey stole glances at the pictures, she thought they seemed pretty routine—enlargements of some kind of microscopic organisms. Then O’Shey noticed the words printed below the images: “Search for Life on Mars.” She asked the woman if somebody had found Martians. The woman said, “We don’t know,” and wanted to know why O’Shey had asked. O’Shey pointed out the caption under the pictures and the woman replied, “Oh, yeah”—as if she had messed up. The woman then asked O’Shey to keep all this to herself. O’Shey agreed—but managed to make some extra copies of the images on the sly.

The space center workforce always provided a steady stream of customers, and these were not the first NASA pictures O’Shey had pinched for herself, thinking they might be something “cool.” Through friends, the Kinko’s worker soon mailed copies of the pilfered pictures to a leading advocate of the theory that an alien civilization had sculpted a giant face on the surface of Mars and that there had been other signs of extraterrestrials covered up by the government, in the mode of Fox’s
The X-Files.
The recipient—the conspiracy theorist—would ignore O’Shey’s pictures until the day the news broke worldwide. Then O’Shey would learn that her woman customer was Kathie Thomas. Once word of O’Shey’s shenanigans got around NASA, via the Web, Kinko’s fired her—collateral comeuppance from a rock that had augered into the Antarctic 13,000 years earlier.

The tensions between the clandestine operatives of the McKay group and their broader community of interest crackled and thumped like distant lightning strikes all through the first half of 1996, most visibly at a series of tribal events.

In the run-up to a March conference in Houston, for example—a major annual gathering of lunar and planetary scientists—the McKay team initially indicated that they would make a presentation on the magnetic crystals. They belatedly decided they’d better not. Gibson would say later that the thinking was “Someone might ask a question that would force us to give away our major finding. . . . If you were on to the biggest scoop of your life, would you tell people?” They withdrew the paper.

At a gathering on meteorites in Berlin, no representative from the McKay group showed up. This offended some who were there, who had heard the buzz and looked forward to seeing the team stand up before an audience of their peers who could give the claims a fair evaluation and a dose of constructive criticism. They wondered why the team was hiding.

Later that summer, the Lunar and Planetary Institute near the space center was the scene of a lunch seminar that brought together in a cramped room some sixty or so researchers to hear three colleagues describe their work on the Mars rock. One of the speakers was Chris Romanek. The scientists took turns describing what they had found and debating their conflicts. Soon, attendees began to catch on that Chris Romanek (back in town on sabbatical from his new job) knew things he was refusing to tell. He kept saying, “I can’t answer that.” He was withholding evidence! The lunch turned abruptly into a free-for-all, and people started to bash Romanek in “come clean, you dirty rat” tones: “Why can’t you tell us?” “This is so unprofessional!” The crowd eventually calmed down, but the incident, again, left a residue of bitterness toward the McKay group.

What no outsiders realized at the time was that
Science
magazine had just accepted the McKay Nine’s paper for publication. The magazine’s rules strictly prohibited them from saying a public word about it before the formal announcement. Some scientists vehemently objected to this prohibition, in general, as infringing on the free flow of scientific information, but the McKay group believed it helped keep the process disciplined and responsible, preventing a free-for-all in the popular media, where inaccuracies could proliferate.

Throughout the first half of 1996, the McKay group was consumed with the preparations for going public. They started by thrashing through a series of disagreements over how to word the paper they would submit to
Science.
Gibson wrote the initial draft, but none of them was satisfied with it. As Gibson was the first to admit, it was a little too bold.

At some point, the group decided that McKay, who was not only cautious but also the senior scientist, would be the lead author.

In their line of work, being the first to publish a paper reporting a new advance, when it led to a succession of independent reports, was a source of prestige and authority—the bigger the discovery, the greater the rewards. And when there were multiple authors, the first name on the published work was generally assumed to have made the largest contribution to the project. Sometimes this was a close call, and other factors (such as seniority or reputation) would weigh on the scales.

The principals in the McKay group liked to say that they were not much for hierarchy. They were equals.

They reworked the manuscript. Messages and drafts flew between Houston and Palo Alto. Zare led a contingent from Stanford to spend a weekend in Houston. They went over the points they needed to clarify, the revisions they had to make. And all of this was just the first round of revisions.

In the abstract, or short summary, written for the
Science
manuscript, for example, one Stanford editing notation said of the final sentence: “Too strong! Suggest softening.” On the other hand, it suggested strengthening the role of the organics discovered at Zarelab: “Isn’t statement that these are the first organic molecules discovered from Mars important enough to put in abstract?” The group finally hammered out a written summary of the data and a hypothesis (what a trial lawyer would call the theory of the case) that they could all live with.

On April 4, 1996, the McKay team shipped the paper to
Science,
with the bland title “Search for Life on Mars: A Study of Martian Meteorites.” The journal’s editors treated it like the hot potato it was. They limited knowledge of it to as few people as possible, while subjecting it to intense scrutiny by authoritative outside experts—including the ill but alert Carl Sagan.

Suffering from myelodysplasia, a disease of the bone marrow, Sagan had just returned home from an operation when he learned that NASA scientists might have detected fossils in the unusual rock from Mars. Two years earlier, Sagan had written about the failure to find evidence of microbes in any of the Martian meteorites, adding pointedly and optimistically: “so far.”

Sagan was the most famous and charismatic scientific personality since Einstein. He had mastered physics, genetics, chemistry, and geology, as well as astronomy, in the service of his lifelong investigation into the potential for life beyond Earth. He was the romantic bard of the cosmos—but he was also an aggressive champion of healthy skepticism, of the scientific method, and of the need for scientists to communicate more clearly with the public. It is easy to imagine these alter egos collectively relishing the news about the Mars rock and the range of possibilities, even as the man wrestled with his own mortality.

All through the summer, the McKay team responded to questions and provided rewrites. The process took an unusually long time.

Most of the assessments by the referees reflected the complexity of the topic and the number of specialties involved. The reviewers would come back with comments such as “In my area of technical expertise, with the following little corrections, I find the work to be reasonable. But there are areas in the paper I am not an expert in.” The editor of
Science
made his own additional suggestions for changes. Among other things, the initial paper was much too long for the magazine, at eighteen to twenty pages of text plus another eighteen tables and images. It had to be cut to about one-third of that.