UK News
Electronic Telegraph
Friday 1 November 1996
Issue 527
Life on Mars was found by Britons - and it's still there
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
I found life on Mars seven years ago, says Briton
BRITISH scientists can claim to be the first to have found
evidence of life on Mars in the wake of sensational new evidence
that suggests primitive organisms may still thrive there.
A packed meeting of scientists in London was told yesterday that
methane-belching bugs may have lived on Mars 600,000 years
ago - much more recently than the 3.6 billion years ago suggested
by American work that made headlines in August.
The discovery, by a team from the Open University, raises hopes
that life may still exist in protected regions of our planetary
neighbour. Scientists were told of the "smoking-gun evidence of
life on Mars" by Dr Ian Wright, a member of the Open University
team led by Prof Colin Pillinger, joint organiser of the Royal
Society meeting. "It is a staggering result," Dr Wright said
afterwards.
The all-important question of who was the first to find evidence of
life on the red planet is also challenged by yesterday's evidence,
which puts the British years ahead of the American team. This
underlines the sentiment, articulated at the meeting by the science
minister, Ian Taylor, that Nasa had been less than generous over
crediting the Open University's earlier work.
After hearing reviews of future plans and the Nasa evidence, the
atmosphere of the meeting became electric when it was told by
Dr Wright of two new analyses which support evidence of life on
the red planet.
The first supports earlier work by Prof Pillinger, together with
husband and wife team Dr Wright and Dr Monica Grady, that
revealed a high proportion of organic material within EETA
79001, a Mars meteorite.
Doubts were cast on this evidence after it was published in the
journal Nature in 1989. Yesterday, however, Dr Wright presented
new evidence to show that EETA 79001 did indeed contain
organic material indigenous to the meteorite and not the result of
contamination.
Another experiment backed work by Nasa scientists on the
Martian meteorite ALH 84001. The Open University team found
part of it contained a carbon "signature" typical of
microbially-formed methane. "This is more of a pointer towards
biological activity than we have seen in the past," said Dr Grady.
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