Mars: The Living Planet - Hardcover

Barry E. DiGregorio

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883319587 ISBN 13: 9781883319588

Publisher: Frog Books, 1997

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It was in this book (published on 07/23/97) that Dr. Gilbert V. Levin first announced his conclusion that his 1976 Viking Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment flown on NASA's Viking mission to Mars found living microorganisms in the soil. Shortly afterward Levin presented his results in a scientific paper to the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Optical Engineering in San Diego.

Mars the Living Planet opens with the telling of how curious people became interested in the planet Mars as a world which might harbor some form of life. The book also traces the history of how the science of astronomy and microbiology eventually merged to become the new science known as astrobiology (first called exobiology in the 1960's). The story quickly moves forward to tell the real life story of astrobiologist Dr. Gilbert V. Levin. Levin was the second astrobiologist hand selected by NASA's first Administrator Keith Glennan in 1959 to develop a microbial detection instrument that could look for traces of life on Mars. Levin then went on to work as an scientific investigator on NASA's Mariner 9 Orbiter mission and later with Viking - the first spacecraft ever sent to look for life on another planet. Mars The living Planet details the exciting events that unfolded during the Viking program from the pre-mission testing and on the surface of Mars.

Recently a new scientific paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research with the title "Reanalysis of the Viking results suggests perchlorate and organics at mid-latitudes on Mars" by Rafael Navarro-Gonz�lez and a number of co-authors demonstrates that the Viking gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS) used to invalidate Levin's biology results might have actually found a surprisingly significant amount of organic material in Martian soil at both the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landing sites on Mars. This now reopens the door to the results obtained by Levin's Viking Labeled Release experiments on Mars - a door that has been largely closed for 34 years due to the misinterpretation of the Viking GCMS. A number of newspapers broke the story September 3rd 2010 about the Navarro-Gonz�lez findings including the New York Times and Washington Post.
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From the Author:

The research for Mars The Living Planet took four years to complete and it opened my eyes to how the scientific community sometimes dismisses important evidence. Consider this: It was at the conclusion of the Viking biology results that my book details Levin's struggle within the scientific community and get the data from his Labeled Release experiment accepted as evidence for life. This struggle arose because of data from another Viking instrument called the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS for short) designed to detect organic molecules on Mars. The Viking GCMS was unable to detect any organics from living or non living sources and the scientists working on that instrument and others on the Viking project felt that life on Mars without organic molecules would be impossible to reconcile. This was even though Levin's biology experiment tested the soil of Mars nine times at two landing sites separated by thousands of miles and got positive results for life. In the end the majority of the scientists working on Viking dismissed the biology results in favor of the GCMS findings. From that point on Levin continued to analyze his data in the laboratory coming up with time and again that the results pointed to biology on Mars. In the years that followed Levin proposed sending other life detection instruments to NASA but all were rejected. In fact, no other life detection experiment has ever been flown to Mars in all the 34 years following Viking. To make things even more bizarre, NASA was making plans to bring back soil samples from Mars as early as 2003. Why would NASA risk contaminating the Earth with unstudied microorganisms from Mars if Levin's data were correct? Is this the way science should operate Levin thought? Perhaps the push to keep funds flowing for a humans-to-Mars program was the reason to keep Levin's data out of the public eye? However, what if Mars really does have microbial life and we send human explorers there? Would they die of new diseases while there or worse yet, would they bring them back to Earth for all of us to share? Mars The Living Planet is filled with political intrigue and describes in detail what scientists have to go through become an astrobiologist within the NASA community.

Today Levin's peer reviewed scientific papers in Journals such as Science and the Journal Of Geophysical Research are often ignored and not referenced in most scientific papers dealing with the issue of life on Mars. Why not? Popular television documentaries dealing with the issue of life on Mars and NASA's Viking mission almost always ignore the biology results and erroneously claim all Viking found was a dead barren planet. Again, why isn't Levin interviewed in these documentaries? One look at his outstanding resume and CV online is all one needs to know this is a man of scientific genius and integrity. Since the discovery of life on another planet would be one of the most significant findings in history, it is hard to imagine why Levin has met with so much resistance both from within NASA and in the scientific community at large. Is the discovery of microbial life on Mars so important that the government fears it might topple aspects of our civilization? Mars The Living Planet makes an effort to try to answer these and other questions.
-Barry E. DiGregorio - Author

About the Author:

Barry E. DiGregorio has been a science and aerospace writer since 1988. His work has appeared in many national and international magazines including EARTH, New Scientist, Discover, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum, MICROBE, Today's Chemical Engineer, Analytical Chemistry, Chemical Innovation, Aviation History, Invention & Technology and many more. Barry also is a Research Associate for the Cardiff Center for Astrobiology in Wales in the United Kingdom and has published scientific papers dealing with astrobiology, life on Mars and the wisdom or lack thereof to bring back samples of Mars to the Earth. Because Barry felt the Viking biology data could be a valid warning from Mars not to bring soil samples directly to Earth he formed the worlds first independent astroenvironmental organization called the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return (ICAMSR for short) (Google it) . Today ICAMSR continues to raise awareness to the issue of contaminating other planets with Earth microbes as well as contamination of our own world with microbes that might be found living or in stasis on other celestial bodies in our solar system. ICAMSR also supports and defends the Viking Lander data obtained from the surface of Mars by Dr. Gilbert V. Levin's Labeled Release experiment.

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