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British scientists join Nasa in hunt for aliens
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
BRITISH and American scientists will join forces in a quest to find alien
life, Nasa announced this week.Prof Baruch Blumberg, director of Nasa's
Astrobiology Institute, is also hoping to enlist British scientists to help
discover the origins of life on Earth. He wants to pool intellectual
resources with the British Astrobiology Forum and other leading biologists
working in these two areas, which are considered the biggest quests in
modern biology.Speaking of his ambition to trace the nature, evolution and
distribution of life in the cosmos, Prof Blumberg said: "I don't think it
is going to work if America alone tries to dominate astrobiology. This work
offers opportunities for all of us, and co-operative international research
is needed.'The agreement - between scientists not governments - follows
discussions with the Astronomer Royal and leading British astrobiologists,
including Dr Alan Penny of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire,
an expert on discovering planets like Earth. So far about 50 have been
discovered outside our Solar System.The agreement will be formally
announced in 2001, said Prof Blumberg, a former Master of Balliol College,
Oxford, where he began his biochemistry doctorate 50 years ago, and a Nobel
Laureate in 1976 for helping to develop a hepatitis vaccine. As the
director of the Nasa Astrobiology Institute, in California's Silicon
Valley, Prof Blumberg is co-ordinating the efforts of about 500 scientists.
Despite the announcement by Nasa in 1996 that alien life may have thrived
on Mars, based on a meteorite, he keeps an open mind. Nasa is planning six
Mars missions this decade which may culminate in a manned mission around
2023. Britain will make a key contribution, since the British probe Beagle
2 will be the next to hunt for life when it lands in 2003. Tough organisms
known as extremophiles offer the most intriguing insights into alien life.
Earlier this year Prof Blumberg, 75, visited Badwater in California's Death
Valley, where the temperature once peaked at 127.4F (53.01C) to inspect
heat-loving micro-organisms. This summer he went to the other extreme in
the Haughton Impact Crater on Devon Island, in the Canadian Arctic. In the
polar desert, which has features similar to Mars, he helped hunt for bugs
that form biofilms in which bacterial communities live on damp rock at
freezing temperatures. Stromatolites, fossilised versions of these
colonies, are common on Earth. Understanding how they formed could help
identify equivalents on Mars. Prof Blumberg said British scientists would
attend a meeting in February to discuss Europa, one of Jupiter's moons that
may harbour a subterranean sea under its frozen surface hosting living
micro-organisms.Even if, in the short term, no proof is found that alien
life exists beyond our planet, the quest will be important. Prof Blumberg
is confident that astrobiology "will change our ideas of what life actually
is".
