[meteorite-list] Book Review: The Rock From Mars

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/746/1  

Review: The Rock from Mars
by Jeff Foust
The Space Review
November 20, 2006

The Rock from Mars: A Detective Story on Two Planets
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400060109/spaceviews>
by Kathy Sawyer
Random House, 2006
hardcover, 416 pp.,illus
ISBN 1-4000-6010-9
US$25.95/C$35.95

This past August marked the tenth anniversary of what originally
appeared to be one of the landmark scientific discoveries of the
twentieth century, if not of all time: evidence that life once existed
on Mars. The August 1996 announcement generated a massive surge of media
attention, but in August 2006 the anniversary of that announcement
merited only a handful of articles, including one in this publication
(see The Space Review, August 7, 2006). This decline in attention 
reflects the tarnished nature of the discovery today: while the original 
team of scientists who made the discovery, as well as some others, 
continue to argue that meteorite ALH84001 contains evidence of past 
Martian life, others have argued that the evidence can be explained by 
inorganic means and/or terrestrial contamination. So how did such a small 
rock create such a huge controversy? It's a story ably told by Kathy 
Sawyer in The Rock from Mars.

Sawyer, a science reporter for the Washington Post for over a decade,
covers essentially the full arc of ALH84001's history, starting with its
discovery in Antarctica in the final days of 1984. Originally
misclassified as a relatively ordinary meteorite, most likely a piece of
the large asteroid Vesta, it took nearly a decade for scientists to not
only ascertain its true origin, but also find that, at 4.5 billion years
old, it was one of the oldest rocks found yet in the solar system, far
older than the handful of other Martian meteorites previously
discovered. That led to further scrutiny of the meteorite, primarily by
NASA scientists in the labs of Building 31 at the Johnson Space Center,
turning up the chrondrules, magnetic crystals, fossil-like features, and
other evidence that became public knowledge in a most public way in
early August of 1996.

Of particular interest will be the details Sawyer provides about the
machinations within NASA and the White House in the weeks leading up to
the announcement, including then-NASA administrator Dan Goldin's
meetings on the subject with President Clinton and Vice President Gore.

The Rock from Mars doesn't end with the discovery, of course, covering
the aftermath of the August 7, 1996 press conference at NASA
Headquarters with the reaction - much of it surprisingly visceral and
negative - from the scientific community. Planetary sciences meetings
became hotbeds for vigorous, vociferous debate on the evidence in the
original 1996 paper. Camps of scientists on both sides of the
issue - either for or against a Martian biological explanation for the
features seen in ALH84001 - emerged, with little sign of an emerging
consensus, only the exchange of papers and presentations. Little wonder,
then, that ALH84001 has faded from our collective consciousness: from a
scientific standpoint, there's still an ongoing debate about its
significance.

While many of those details may already be familiar to potential
readers, what sets The Rock from Mars apart is both the background
Sawyer provides and the little-known details about the discovery. She
fleshes out the histories and personalities of many of the key players
in this saga, including the scientists involved with the story, turning
them from abstract characters into real people. Of particular interest
to many will be the details Sawyer provides about the machinations
within NASA and the White House in the weeks leading up to the
announcement, including then-NASA administrator Dan Goldin's meetings on
the subject with President Clinton and Vice President Gore. Perhaps the
only stumble in the book towards the end, where Sawyer recounts a debate
at an astrobiology conference in 2002 between William Schopf, the UCLA
paleobiologist who was a noted critic of the discovery (he was the one
who quoted the Carl Sagan dictum about "extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence" at the August 1996 press conference) and a
British scientist - not about life on Mars but about an earlier discovery
by Schopf about fossil evidence for early life on Earth. The debate
underscored the difficulty in understanding the formation of terrestrial
life, let alone any Martian life, but probably didn't require the level
of detail presented in the book.

In the final chapter of The Rock from Mars, Sawyer notes that regardless
of the scientific interpretation of ALH84001, the August 1996
announcement and its aftermath had numerous effects, from illustrating
the scientific and technical challenges of finding evidence of life in
rock samples (and the difficulty involved in bringing additional samples
back to Earth uncontaminated), to the outpouring of public support for
such research. "Like a living thing," she concludes, "the rock had
altered its adopted habitat in mischievous and interesting ways. Like a
Siren, it lured its discoverers irresistibly toward its treacherous and
baffling source. Like a teacher, it instructed us in our ignorance and
in the wondrous possibility forged by human audacity." That may indeed
turn out to be the enduring legacy of ALH84001.