Rock of ages
THANKS to Kathy Sawyer’s vibrant writing, “The Rock From Mars” unfolds like a Hollywood cliffhanger. Sawyer, who covered space science for the Washington Post for 17 years, subtitles her book “A Detective Story on Two Planets,” and she delivers both the suspense and the puzzle plot that one expects from the mystery genre.
The tale begins in Antarctica, where ALH84001, the famous meteorite alleged to contain evidence of Martian life, was found. So well does Sawyer evoke the “clean, ancient blue ice” that you feel yourself astride the snowmobile with meteorite hunter Robbie Score, who is about to bag the trophy. Your gloved hands are seared by the bitter chill. You spot a “grayish-green” specimen with a “fusion crust” (“the glassy black charring from its passage through Earth’s atmosphere”), and you retrieve it. Because you are part of the process, you see nothing over the top about Score’s comment in her field notes: “Yowza-Yowza.”
“ALH84001” is not a mysterious or arbitrary name. ALH stands for the Allan Hills, the area where Score spied the rock; “84” refers to the year, 1984. And “001” means that the rock was picked up first in that year’s counting; the second would be “002.” After its collection, the rock was shipped to the “meteorite curation laboratory” at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it essentially sat until 1993, when JSC geochemists Chris Romanek and Everett Gibson began examining the carbonates inside it.
The carbonates, they determined, had indeed originated on Mars and, more astonishing, had formed in what scientists call “the biological Goldilocks zone -- not too hot, not too cold, and, conceivably, just right for life to exist.” Using diluted acid, Romanek etched away the surface materials on the carbonate areas so he could examine their internal structure under the scanning electron microscope. What he found “stopped him cold.” He saw worm-like shapes that suggested fossilized “nanobacteria” (the term derives from “nanometer,” which denotes a billionth of a meter). Excited by these findings, Romanek and Gibson alerted NASA geologist David McKay, who put together a secret team to investigate the rock’s staggering implications. The team’s data were published in the journal Science in August 1996.
Sawyer has a keen sense of how to structure a story. To highlight the winsome attributes of her scientific protagonists at the space center, she contrasts them with a nasty antagonist -- J. William Schopf, a UCLA professor celebrated for having found a 3.5-billion-year-old terrestrial microfossil said to be the oldest of Earth’s life-forms ever uncovered, who disputed the McKay team’s thesis that the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the rock had come from a biological source.
The space center team comes alive in vivid detail. McKay, the leader, is not just a crack geologist but also a grad-school lothario, who finally renounces his little black book to marry an English teacher. Romanek is not just an expert on carbonates but also a “slender, athletic” runner who grew up in the “foothills of South Carolina.” Gibson is not just a meteorite specialist but also a mustachioed West Texan with a “ready grin” who worked in the oil fields to pay his way through college. And Kathie Thomas-Keprta, the fourth JSC investigator, is not just a specialist in carbon chemistry but also a woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to “Paleontologist Barbie,” on display in her workspace. Even bad guy Schopf, who does his best to shoot down the team’s startling conclusions, is not a one-dimensional villain; Sawyer depicts him as a meticulous scientist with a formidable debating talent.
The minor characters are fascinating too. When McKay’s team went public with its data, Bill Clinton was president. In contrast to the current administration, which has tended to subordinate science to religion, both Clinton and Vice President Al Gore impressed the NASA experts with their vast knowledge of and respect for science. As Dan Goldin, NASA’s administrator at the time, would later put it: “I’m good; I know stuff. But I gotta tell you, these guys had a depth of knowledge.... They took me to deep places. It blew me away.” Of course, not everyone at the White House was so exemplary. The Mars rock helped take down Clinton advisor Dick Morris, who leaked government secrets, including details of the meteorite, to a call girl. Although the woman did not fully grasp what Morris had told her, she nevertheless tried to sell information to a tabloid reporter about a “vegetable in a rock” that proved there was “life on Pluto.”
Throughout the book, Sawyer creates simple analogies for complicated concepts. She elucidates one of the principal arguments made by Schopf and others against the McKay team’s evidence -- that the nanofossils were too small to accommodate “the barest genetic essentials of a living cell” -- by noting that if the carbonate globules containing the alleged Martian nanofossils were each the size of a football stadium, the nanofossils would have to be the size of hot dogs. She explains what an element’s isotopes are by suggesting that the reader picture an “isotope” of a car: “The heavier isotope of a Toyota, for example, would be the same model of car but with a permanent extra load -- the equivalent of extra neutrons -- in the trunk.” Whenever she introduces a technical term, it is one understandable to the general reader and essential to the story. If I have a tiny quibble with this very good book, it is her occasional tendency toward terrible puns, such as the reference to ALH84001 as a “rock star.”
Although “The Rock From Mars” is fun, it is also a good picture of how science is done. Readers may cheer for the McKay team, but they leave the book understanding that scientific research is ultimately not about who’s right or wrong but about the building up of knowledge. Still, when the censorious Schopf gets taken down a peg in a confrontation with a British scientist, it’s hard not to feel gleeful. Certainly, some scientists watching the encounter -- which took place at NASA’s Ames Research Center, near Mountain View, Calif., during a 2002 conference on the emerging field of astrobiology -- felt that way. (“I want to sit up front,” said one researcher. “I want to see the spittle.”) Because Sawyer has explained the science so well, readers can follow the points and counterpoints as if they were blows in a prizefight. As she summarizes it, the “intellectual virtuosos ... had gone for each other’s eyes.”
In the end -- or, at any event, by the publication date of Sawyer’s book -- scientists had issued “at least 18 peer-reviewed papers in support of the McKay group’s claims” and 29 against them. But no one disputes that the ongoing controversy has been a huge boon to astrobiology, particularly in the nanometer realm. Nearly a decade after its Warholian 15 minutes, ALH84001 -- as Sawyer tells its story -- still exerts a powerful attraction: “Like a Siren, it lured its discoverers irresistibly toward its treacherous and baffling source.” This, of course, is the rock’s most potent legacy: a rekindling of interest in exploring Mars and beyond. *
