Discovery 
A Beautiful Mind 
It Came From Outer Space
When scientists at the Johnson Space Center thought they had found signs of life in a Martian rock, it was good news for NASA, Bill Clinton, Hollywood, the tabloids–and even Dick Morris’ favorite call girl.
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McKay was relieved by her answer. He knew, of course, that the results were premature. He was haunted by the memory of the cold-fusion fiasco, in which a major discovery was heralded in the popular press and then excoriated by the scientific community. David McKay—and NASA—could not afford that.
THE TEAM MEMBERS CHECKED AND RECHECKED THEMSELVES. They ran more tests for contamination and found none; they examined other Antarctic meteorites for similarities and came up empty-handed. They met and discussed, and they read. In March 1995 they lost Chris Romanek—his fellowship had expired, and NASA had no money to offer him full-time work. They were close to an answer, but not close enough. McKay had heard about an extremely powerful state-of-the-art SEM in NASA’s engineering division, one that could magnify from 100,000 to 150,000 times. It had been developed in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster to detect tiny cracks in rockets. Researchers don’t like to share their equipment any more than they like to share information, but McKay had seniority and an abundance of goodwill. Engineering gave him access to the machine.
Gibson was present when McKay put a sample of the rock in the microscope and began to roam its surface. The pictures projected onto the machine’s video screens were so clear that the men froze in their seats. At this magnification, the wormlike shapes before them looked startlingly familiar. That night, Gibson could not sleep. McKay had printed a photograph of the slide and left it in his office for his thirteen-year-old daughter, Jill, to find.
“What does that look like to you?” he asked casually.
“Bacteria,” she said, in that youthful, know-it-all tone.
IT WAS HARD TO KNOW WHO WAS SPENDING MORE TIME IN THE LAB in the dark: McKay, whose wife had taken to calling his colleagues when he lost track of time and worked through dinner, or Thomas-Keprta. She had found tiny mineral grains on the rims of the carbonates that struck her as odd: bits of iron oxide, known as magnetite, and bits of iron sulfite, known as pyrotite. Though both substances existed in other meteorites she had investigated, these were much closer together, sometimes almost touching. In her experience, that did not make sense. That was because her experience was as a geologist, not a microbiologist. Upon further reading, Thomas-Keprta realized the mineral bits were in a state of disequilibrium, nature’s clue that they were by-products of living things.
Then, in early 1996, Thomas-Keprta found something else: mineral grains inside the carbonates that she could identify by their shape and chemistry as gregite. She got McKay and another colleague on the phone. “Come and take a look,” she said breathlessly. This time, she knew instantly what she had found. Ninety-nine percent of the time, gregite in that size range is a by-product of bacteria.
Later that evening, she stepped out into the air certain that she had accomplished the impossible. “This could be the coolest day of my life,” she thought, “and there’s no band playing. Where is everybody?”
She called home. “Mom,” she said, “this could be something really big.”
“Sweetheart, that’s great,” her mother said, trying to sound enthusiastic.
“No, really,” Kathie Thomas-Keprta said.
THE TEAM HAD FOUR LINES OF PROOF, NO ONE OF WHICH COULD STAND ALONE but which were powerful taken together. They had the necessary temperature for life, they had both its organic and mineral by-products, and they had structures that looked uncannily like living things on Earth. Now their biggest problem was no longer scientific but political: They could be scooped. Schopf’s visit had caused some curiosity. So had the paper Thomas-Keprta had presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The team had spent too much time exchanging glances in meetings, remaining mute whenever the topic of the Mars rock came up. Thomas-Keprta had submitted a paper to the March 1996 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference about her work on the TEM—blandly entitled “Microanalysis of Unique Fine-Grained Minerals Within the Martian Meteorite ALH84001”—when it occurred to the team that presentation of the paper would prevent them from publishing their complete results in any well-regarded scientific journal. Such publications have an “us first” rule: They want exclusive access to important discoveries and are not interested in reprinting information. Thomas-Keprta, on the advice of Zare and McKay, pulled her paper from the conference. Too many scientists would remember her 1995 presentation on the PAHs and put two and two together.
The JSC team members, so careful for so long, were ready to tell their story. They began drafting a paper for the prestigious journal Science. Then, there was just one more thing to do. David McKay had to tell his JSC supervisor what they had been working on for the past year and a half.
IF CAUTION COMES NATURALLY TO NASA SCIENTISTS, it is part of the protective coloration of NASA bureaucrats. “We’d better be right,” division chief Douglas Blanchard thought to himself when he heard McKay’s news. Science, too, was cautious. McKay knew that the cold-fusion disaster had occurred largely because the information had been released to the general populace without proper peer review. Science would provide something like an insurance policy, a responsibility the publication took seriously in this case. Though the editors typically approved manuscripts after they had been vetted by four or five outside readers, the JSC team’s paper went to nine.
The team made numerous revisions in response to the readers’ queries. They had to weasel-word this and wimp-word that—make no claims; just present the evidence, they were told—but in the end everyone had been satisfied. Though the paper’s title was a little wishy-washy—“Search for Past Life on Mars: Possible Relic of Biogenic Activity in Martian Meteorite ALH84001”—the editors had let the authors (there were nine of them by the time the research was completed) keep their last sentence as written: “Although there are alternative explanations for each of these phenomena when taken individually, when they are considered collectively, particularly in view of their spatial association, we conclude that they are evidence of primitive life on Mars.” Science accepted the paper on April 23 and set a publication date of August 16. Though it would send the paper to five hundred reporters a week early, there was a gentleman’s agreement that its contents would not be written about before publication.
For most scientists, such confidentiality is a minor problem. For the JSC team, who worked on the public payroll, it was a little more complicated. Once Blanchard had been advised that Science had set a publication date—legitimizing the JSC team’s work as good science—he sent news of the discovery up the chain of command to Johnson Space Center director George Abbey, who hopped a plane for Washington to deliver that rarest of gifts, good news from NASA.
It was the last week in July 1996. The secret life of the Martian rock had come to an end, and its public life was just beginning.
ON JULY 30, JUST AS MCKAY WAS TAKING OUT THE GARBAGE, he got a call. It was his ever-protective secretary, Yvette Damien. The White House was on the phone, she said. Could she give them his home number?
The callers were Wes Huntress, an associate administrator for the Office of Space Science, and Dan Goldin, none other than the head of NASA. They praised the scientists’ work and discussed the contents of the paper. Then Goldin asked one last question: Were they sure this news could be kept quiet for two more weeks? Science’s publication date, it turned out, was highly advantageous to the White House. NASA could schedule a press conference that would compete with Bob Dole’s acceptance speech as the Republican nominee. The rock was no longer just an object of science. It had entered the world of politics and would soon enter the popular culture as well. It had taken on a new characteristic whose identification did not require a team of scientists: currency. Rapidly escalating currency.
Dan Goldin was a man who understood currency, which may be why, a few hours later, McKay and Gibson got another call, ordering them to Washington immediately. The two men flew up and the next day met with NASA’s public affairs division to orchestrate the rock’s debut before the American public. Mindful of the Hubble telescope problems, the PR types grilled the scientists carefully, as did Goldin, who took 27 pages of notes during a subsequent three-hour meeting. At the end of the session—heading off to brief the president’s chief of staff, his national science adviser, the vice president, and after he was awakened from his nap, the president himself—Goldin had an unusual request. “Can I give you a hug?” he asked McKay.
A trim, De Niro—esque political infighter with a tough, outer-borough accent, Goldin knew that this discovery could mean salvation for NASA. More money, better morale, a restoration of prestige. But he also knew the risks. Looking into McKay’s eyes, he asked one more question: “Are you guys sure of this?” (When Al Gore heard the news from Goldin, he would react with the same mixture of ecstasy and insecurity: “Wait a minute—our guys, government scientists, did this?”)
Flying back home, McKay began to worry. The White House, he’d been warned, was notoriously leaky, and on Saturday he was scheduled to leave town for a family vacation in Garner State Park. Mary Fae had been looking forward to this trip for a long time, and nothing—not even the possibility of life on Mars—was going to get in the way. McKay calmed himself with the knowledge that he would have a NASA pager for emergencies. What could go wrong?
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