There is a revolution in thought that's in progress at the moment, but very
few people are aware of it. What we're currently doing is writing the Second
Edition of the Book of Genesis, but this time, trying to fill in the details.

In that regard, PBS is running a four-hour show tonight and tomorrow called
"Origins." The home page for the show is at:

     http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/

From what I know, the show will directly address the extraordinary revolution
that's occurring not so much in our understanding of the origin of "life, the
universe and everything," but in the revolution in the method of attack that
we're now using to understand the origins of life in the universe. Virtually
every field of scientific endeavor (cosmology, chemisty, astrophysics, geology,
planetology, biology, etc.) is now being marshalled to work towards a common
goal. The end result is that it's an extremely exciting time to be a scientist.

In March, we (AICS Research) recorded the plenary talks at the third
Astrobiology Science Conference that was held at NASA Ames Research Center, Mt. View,
CA in QCShow format. QCShow is a free product that was derived from our
experimentations in presenting tutorials in QCTerm, and we're just on the cusp of
publicly releasing it. I suspect that tonight's NOVA will talk about the
Astrobiology Conference, at least peripherally. In a few weeks, if you wish, you'll
be able to watch and listen to the talks given at the conference. In the
interim, you can get a sense of the ideas presented from the web page at:

      http://aics-research.com/lectures/abscicon2004/

In that regard, I've attached below a long article from the NY Times of just
a few days ago that discusses the conference. Even though the meeting was held
half a year ago now, the conference continues to be intensively talked about
in the press, but for good reason. Evolution isn't merely a hypothesis or a
theory with NASA. It isn't even a "fact". Rather, it's become NASA's blueprint
for the next half-century of exploration. In the oddest of all developments,
NASA, a standard governmental agency, is transforming itself into perhaps the
most philosophical organization that has ever existed, perhaps more so than any
historical university or church.

NASA understands what it's doing -- but it's very likely that most of the
American population doesn't. Several big events are perhaps only a few years
away, including possibly for the first time the novel creation of life in the
laboratory from inanimate chemicals. Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science
Institute, the people who run Hubble, mentioned at the beginning of his talk
that some people asked him if his lecture, "Cosmology and Life," wasn't just a
short version of the Bible. And Paul Davies, the Australian astrophysicsist and
popular author, introduced Jack Szostak of Mass. General Hospital as "Dr.
Frankenstein himself." As a result, NASA has begun dialogues with a number of
council of churches in order to prepare, or at least soften, reaction when the
more fundamentalist churches start paying attention

NASA, for a very long time, has played down the evolutionary biology aspects
of what it was doing, but all of that has changed, and the search for the
origins of life throughout the universe now dominates NASA's mission statement.

Wirt Atmar

=======================================

September 26, 2004
The Genesis Project
By CHARLES SIEBERT

One morning, a little more than a year from now, a group of scientists,
members of what is known as the Stardust mission, will be standing around on a
remote stretch of salt flat in the Utah desert, eagerly awaiting the arrival of a
very special package. It will, if all goes as planned, enter our atmosphere
much like a meteorite, plunging earthward until the final stage of re-entry,
when a small parachute will open. The object, about the size and overall
appearance of a large metal cephalopod mollusk, better known as the nautilus, will
drift harmlessly to the ground, its belly filled with the dust and debris
gathered from the comet Wild 2, which scientists now expect may offer significant
clues about life's origins here on earth.

''These comets are thought to contain some of the most primitive material in
the solar system, more or less unchanged since its formation,'' Scott A.
Sandford, a NASA research astrophysicist and co-investigator of the Stardust
mission, told me one afternoon this past spring. We sat talking in the dining area
of a huge white plastic tent pitched in the middle of the NASA Ames Research
Center campus in Moffett Field, Calif., a tree-dotted, 440-acre sprawl of tan
brick laboratory buildings.

''Among the things we'll want to know about the material we've collected,''
continued Sandford, a stout, rugged-looking man with a way of talking about
even the most far-flung, wondrous endeavors as though he were a plumber
discussing your bathroom pipes, ''is what fraction of it is organic, what kinds of
organics they are and what possible role they may have played in life's emergence
on earth.''

Searching for the origins of life in the dust of a comet might sound like a
bit of cosmically cockeyed indirection, something straight out of a New Age
sci-fi novel. The Stardust mission, however, is typical of a number of projects
to divine life's origins, all part of a $75-million-a-year scientific
enterprise now being financed by NASA. It is known as astrobiology.

The appellation invokes images of ferns in outer space, or interstellar
swamps, but these are mundane imaginings compared with the various avenues of
exploration being pursued by astrobiologists. There are projects like drilling into
the earth's boiling-hot deep-sea vents or icy dark Antarctic waters in order
to do DNA analysis of primitive life forms. Or trying to replicate in the
laboratory the moment when the chemical earth first transformed into a biological
one. Or lassoing a multibillion-year-old comet in search of organic compounds
like amino acids and carbon, the so-called building blocks of life.

First conceived of by a group of NASA scientists back in the mid-90's, the
NASA Astrobiology Institute has since evolved into a global enterprise: a
partnership between NASA and 16 research teams based at universities and institutes
around the country, plus a number of international consortia. Many of the
world's roughly 2,000 astrobiologists and other scientists also flock to the
biannual Astrobiology Science Conference, the most recent one held at the NASA Ames
Research Center.

Seated around Sandford under the main tent of the astrobiology conference
this past spring were scientists from all across the globe, representing a
dizzying array of disciplines. A partial list would include biologists,
microbiologists, physicists, astrophysicists, theoretical biophysicists, chemists, organic
chemists, geologists, bio-geo-chemists, paleontologists, paleobotanists and
astronomers. And yet they were all there as like-minded pilgrims, devoted to
astrobiology's core mission of answering the three fundamental questions of our
existence. To quote from the cover of NASA's official astrobiology time line,
which begins some 15 billion years ago with the Big Bang and shows no other
demarcation until the formation of our solar system some 11 billion years later:
''Where do we come from? Are we alone? Where are we going?''

These are compelling times we live in. Around the world, wars are being
fueled by fundamentalist adherence to ancient creeds. Here in the United States,
where religious fervor has in many ways never been stronger, creationism still
finds its way into some classrooms, and biblically accurate creation theme
parks are built, with scripture accompanying dinosaur-bone displays. And yet all
the while, the United States government is allotting millions of dollars each
year to the global endeavor of piecing together from an ever-growing body of
evidence the actual story of creation.

''The whole movement arose back in the mid-1990's,'' recalls David Morrison,
a NASA scientist and one of astrobiology's founders. ''We were looking at that
time to alter our focus in some way, and we suddenly realized that we had a
whole lot of new science and technology that could be brought to bear on the
question of the origin, evolution and distribution of life, everything from the
recent discovery of planets around other stars to the human genome project to
our forthcoming missions to Mars.''

There was a time -- right up until the early 1950's, in fact -- when the
sorts of questions now being addressed by astrobiology were the stuff of either
myth and science fiction, or of only the most marginal, far-fetched or
pie-in-the-sky kinds of science. Now, however, we face a strangely reverse reality: the
state of our knowledge has evolved to the point where our previous
conjecturing about life's origin has been exposed as woefully myopic and parochial, not
nearly far-fetched or skyward-looking enough. Astrobiology is a science born
of a time when it is no longer the prospect of solving the question of life's
origins that seems beyond our powers -- it's trying to imagine what a world in
which we have done so may be like.

Astrobiology's overall mission includes answering the questions of whether
life exists elsewhere and what life's overall prognosis on earth and beyond
might be. The answers to those two queries, however, pivot around science's holy
grail: divining the origin of life in the universe. It is a quest that is being
pursued from three directions: comparative analysis of DNA on earth;
biochemical synthesis of life in the lab, or ''test-tube evolution''; and, finally,
examination of the various organic compounds that exist in the depths of outer
space -- perhaps the ideal laboratory, because of both its deep history and
inherent lack of contamination.

Of astrobiology's three approaches, the first, DNA analysis, is perhaps the
most traditional mode of inquiry, or at least the most grounded. Precisely
because all life forms are made of the same stuff, are all so-called
''DNA-protein-based organisms,'' scientists can now use comparative DNA analysis to trace
the common roots of life's collective family tree further back than ever
imagined.

''I like to use the comparison of tracing the phylogeny of languages,'' says
Antonio Lazcano of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a featured
speaker at the astrobiology conference. ''Suppose we want to trace the roots of
the Romance languages like French, Italian, Spanish, etc. It is clear that
they all diverge from the Latin spoken, for example, by Roman soldiers in the
different regions of Europe. Now, we know Latin is a very ancient language. But
we would hardly say that it is a primitive one. So the question then becomes
what came before that.''

As with any language tree, the further back in time you attempt to go with
it, the more the base starts to break into those root utterances from which all
modern languages emanate. After a point, the derivations and linkages have to
be more or less intuited. And yet with the life-tree puzzle that astrobiology
is now putting together, even the still-to-be assembled pieces are stunning
both for the expanse of time they represent and the undeniable, if unlikely and
to some objectionable, linkages they establish.

There is, for example, a consensus now about the existence and the essential
character of life's common ancestor, the great, great, great (to the power of
a gazillion) grandparent of you and me and everything else that we see (or
can't see) living around us. It even has a name: LUCA, or Last Universal Common
Ancestor, although some prefer the name Cenancestor, from the Greek root
''cen'' (meaning ''together'') and others favor LCA, or Last Common Ancestor.

There is very little known about LUCA, though scientists currently agree on
two things. One, that it had to have existed. And two, that it had to have been
extremely rugged. As recently as the mid-70's there were thought to be only
two domains of life on earth: the prokaryotes -- small, single-celled bacteria
lacking a nucleus or other complex cellular structures; and the eukaryotes --
organisms made of one or more cells with a nucleus, a category embracing
everything from complex multicellular entities, like mammals, reptiles, birds and
plants, to the single-celled amoeba.

In 1977, however, a molecular biologist from the University of Illinois named
Carl Woese identified within the prokaryotes a genetically distinct class of
bacteria now known as the archaea, many of them primitive, single-celled
organisms known as ''extremophiles'' because they live in extreme environments like
volcanic vents or Antarctic waters. When the DNA of archaea was compared with
that of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, it became clear that the trifurcation of
life from LUCA occurred far earlier than previously believed, well over three
billion years ago, when there was little or no oxygen in the earth's
atmosphere.

LUCA, in other words, had to have been a hard-bitten little extremophile of
some kind or other. And while the debate rages as to precisely what sort of
entity this common ancestor was, and which of the three current domains it was
more kindred to, scientists have now discovered a variety of examples of what it
might have been, now thriving all over the earth -- decidedly uncuddly,
extremophilic creatures sometimes called superbugs. There are, for instance, the
acidophiles -- bacteria that have been found to thrive on the gas given off by
raw sewage and that both excrete and multiply in concentrations of acid strong
enough to dissolve metal and destroy entire city sewer systems. At the
opposite end of the spectrum, there are superbugs that live in temperatures below
-320 degrees Fahrenheit, lower than that of liquid nitrogen.

Still, it turns out that some of the clearest, and certainly the most
stunning, evidence of LUCA's former existence and of our inextricable bond with it,
is literally right beneath our noses, within each of our body's cells, in the
form of so-called living fossils. DNA analysis of the distinct organisms, or
organelles, that live inside and help govern the various functions of our body's
cells -- the nucleus, the mitochondria, the flagella and so on -- has
revealed a direct genetic link between these organelles and the primordial earth's
earliest extremophilic bacteria.

Somewhere along the line, in other words, but certainly very early on, these
fully independent, single-celled primordial superbugs and their specialized
functions got co-opted, in a kind of primitive symbiosis, into the greater
service of the more secure, membrane-bound, multitasking complex that would become
the eukarytic cell and its subsequent multicellular manifestations, most
prominent among these (at least in our minds) being ourselves. You and I, and the
darting birds, and the windswept tree boughs, carry around with each of us the
living remnants of our own and all life's fiery origins.

As far along the path toward origins as the analysis of DNA on earth has
already led us, many astrobiologists say it isn't nearly far enough. Indeed, an
entity like LUCA, for all its mysteries, is generally considered to be something
eminently knowable, a relative latecomer in life's story, which must have had
a fairly sophisticated genome to have survived the extreme conditions of the
early earth. If LUCA is the common ancestor of life as we currently recognize
it, the big question is: What came before that?

Many scientists now argue that before LUCA and the emergence of our current
DNA-protein world, there was what's referred to as an RNA world, one made up
only of rudimentary RNA-based entities that were later subsumed into RNA's
current role as our DNA's messenger. And before the RNA-world, there has to have
been what might be described as the real prize for astrobiologists, the
so-called first living organism, or FLO.

FLO may not even be an entity so much as a moment, the very one, in a sense,
that countless alchemists over the centuries -- and later, scientists -- have
tried to isolate. Many credit Stanley Miller with starting the modern science
of origins when, back in the fall of 1952, as a young graduate student in
chemistry at the University of Chicago, he electrically charged in his lab a
flask-bound rendition of the earth's early atmosphere and produced amino acids.
Miller's primordial soup ingredients have since been reconfigured, and his
results somewhat diluted by the revelation that amino acids can be not only easily
synthesized in the lab but also even found floating in outer space. And yet his
experiment catalyzed the current search for that moment when ''being'' began,
when chemicals and crude organic compounds somehow culminated in a first
living thing.

In order to find FLO, astrobiologists must first arrive at a working
definition of ''living.'' ''It all depends on what we mean by biology,'' says Jeffrey
Bada, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at U.C. San
Diego. ''For me, I would say that all you need to define life is imperfect
replication. That's it. Life. And what that means is that the entity can make copies
of itself but not exact copies. A perfectly replicating system isn't alive
because it doesn't evolve. Quartz crystals make exact copies of themselves and
have done from the beginning of the earth. They don't evolve, however, because
they're locked into that particular form. But with imperfect replication you
get mutants that develop some sort of selective advantage that will allow them
to dominate the system. That whole system then evolves, and you get this
cascade of evolution progressing to more complicated entities. But something
preceded all that, something that could do this basic thing of replication and
mutation, and that's what everyone is trying to figure out.''

What is known about FLO is that for it to have happened at all, it had to
have been an even tougher entity than LUCA was merely to overcome the universe's
most prohibitive law, the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that
all matter tends toward entropy, the dissipation of energy. All life is in utter
defiance of that law, a bound, energy-gathering stay, however brief, against
entropy.

The other essential requirement for the kind of imperfect replication system
that Bada describes is that there had to have been a first bit of information,
some kind of biochemical message, or code, however crude, to begin to convey.
Or, in this case, to misconvey, the whole story of life's emergence and
evolution on earth being, in essence, a multibillion-year-long game of telephone,
in which the initial utterance, the one that preceded all others, was
increasingly transmuted and reinvented the further along it was passed. It is the
precise nature of that first utterance that astrobiologists are trying to decipher.

''There are some people,'' Bada says, ''who would argue quite vigorously with
me about whether the simple kind of replicators I speak of qualify as life.
Others would argue that even the sorts of simpler catalytic, self-sustaining
reactions that occur on mineral surfaces are living, or are the first type of
living system, without even the requirement for genetic information. But to me
that's still chemistry, not life. Or it's life as we don't know it.''

A number of chemists are now trying to recreate in their labs at least a
rough approximation of this elusive and somewhat ill-defined transition from the
purely chemical to the biological, searching for the mix of ingredients which
in their interaction create ever more complex molecules in a recurring series
of feedback loops that eventually culminate in a self-replicating system that
soon dominates its environment. Gerald Joyce, a colleague of Bada's at U.C. San
Diego, and one of the pioneers of test-tube evolution, has managed to achieve
such a synthesis in his lab using a random mixture of RNA molecules. Jack
Szostak of the Harvard Medical School, meanwhile, has been doing groundbreaking
work in his lab with organic compounds known as amphiphiles -- compounds that
have been shown to produce in water cell-like structures known as vesicles, the
ideal sort of contained microenvironment that the earliest living entity on
earth might have needed to get started.

''I'm going to stick my neck out here,'' Bada says, ''but I'd be surprised,
very surprised, if in the next 5 or 10 years somebody somewhere doesn't make a
molecular system that can self-replicate with very little interaction on our
part. You just give it the proper chemicals and it starts churning away and
replicates and growing and soon dominates the system.''

Steven Benner, a test-tube evolutionist working with a team of researchers at
the University of Florida, may soon be closing in on that elusive alchemy.
''We're not quite at origins yet,'' he says. ''My goal now is 100 percent
focused on getting a self-replicating system, to make synthetic life. It won't get
us the absolute answer to the question of origins, but it could give us a
model, a framework for understanding how certain pathways that led to life
evolved.''

The search for the origins of life in synthetic life is, as Benner puts it,
like the proverbial drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost, even though
he knows he lost them by the door, because the light is better under the
lamppost. But perhaps -- as poets and lovers have long maintained -- the light is
best out under the stars. The early earth is now thought to have had a number
of different atmospheres over the long course of its coalescence, the most
likely was a rather bland mix of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, one not highly
conducive to the production of amino acids. Meanwhile, amino acids have been
discovered just about everywhere, including inside meteorites and, evidence
suggests, drifting about in the so-called interstellar medium.

Along with carbon and a number of other organic compounds essential to life,
amino acids seem to have come along with the universe's original package,
woven into the very fabric of our solar system and perhaps long before that,
hailing from somewhere out there in that vast 10-billion-year lacuna between the
Big Bang and the earth's debut. In the words of Jill Tarter, an astrobiologist
at the SETI Institute: ''Every atom of iron in our blood was produced in a star
that blew up about 10 billion years ago.'' What those searching the heavens
for the answer to life's origins are trying to decipher is how these seemingly
prepackaged ingredients for life actually became life, and whether our planet
could possibly have been the only viable egg in the universe's sack.

Even the decidedly low-key Sandford starts twisting in his seat like an
excited kid on Christmas morning when he thinks about the return of the Stardust
capsule in January 2006, and the possible secrets buried therein. Once the
material is recovered, certain tests conducted on whatever organic compounds are
found will both certify their extraterrestrial origin and perhaps ultimately
help to determine their approximate age in relation to the formation of our solar
system and of the earth.

''We want to try to get a real sense of what kinds of building blocks are out
there that arrive on planets on Day 1 of their formation,'' says Sandford.
''Of course, since we don't know how exactly life got started, it's hard to
assess how critical each compound is. Even if life is an inevitable byproduct of
stuff falling out of the sky, certain key aspects of life's formation may also
be dominated by indigenous activity on a given planet. Life may have had to
beg and borrow and steal everything it could get to happen, and so why be picky?
For a long time the argument about origins has been an either-or type of
thing: life either happened with a bolt of lightning to the early atmosphere or it
was the opposite extreme of actual bugs falling out of the sky and seeding
the earth. The truth probably falls somewhere in the middle of that.''

While the Stardust mission stands to provide invalu-able insights, the
successful gathering of a comet's dust is a dazzling achievement in and of itself.
The interlude with the comet Wild 2 was timed for its approach to the sun,
which rapidly warmed up the comet's ices, causing dust and gas to blow off the
comet's surface in a vaporous halo, or ''coma.'' The Stardust spacecraft flew
through that coma at approximately 4 miles a second. As it did, a tennis
racket-like device on the craft known as an ''aerogel impact collector'' reached up
and absorbed the comet's dust, then folded down against a metal plate to be
enveloped by the chambers of the nautilus shell.

After the capture -- verified by on-board instruments -- the Stardust drifted
into the outer asteroid belt, and will be nearly another year and a half
getting back to us. As it approaches the outer rim of the earth's atmosphere on
the morning of Jan. 15, 2006, it will release the Stardust capsule for re-entry
and then skip off forever into outer space, its mission accomplished.

At once the draw and the inevitable drawback of a science with a scope as
vast as astrobiology's is that it precludes a good many of its very practitioners
from seeing out their own most inspired visions. While Sandford awaits the
Stardust capsule's return, a number of other astrobiological starcombers have
their sights and hopes set on a mission the results of which neither they nor
many of us alive today will be around to witness: landing upon and drilling into
Jupiter's moon Europa.

About the size of the earth's moon, Europa is covered by ice roughly 6 miles
deep, beneath which is 30 to 60 miles of water, roughly the same volume as
that of the earth's oceans. While water is often thought to be synonymous with
life, Europa is totally dark, ruling out any form of photosynthesis, and thus
life as we understand it. There is also thought to be little or no communication
between the underlying ocean and Europa's surface. All of which makes the
prospect of discovering any signs of life there almost unbearably enticing to
astrobiologists.

''I'd love nothing more than for us to find a thriving RNA world there,''
says Bada. ''We can try to reconstruct that in a lab, but if we had a natural
example of it, that would be fantastic. We'd have a picture of what life may have
been like on earth before it evolved into the modern protein-DNA world of
today. Of course, it's hard to imagine the kind of environment that's on Europa
producing organisms that look anything like the biochemistry we have here,
either modern or LUCA-type organisms. And that's what I find fascinating. Here we
could have a completely independent form of life, even though the chemistry
leading up to it might be universal. Now, I don't expect little green men to
crawl out of the ocean there, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if we didn't see
some extremely interesting chemistry involved in some of the very stages that
led to replicating entities here on earth.''

The first stage of NASA's Europa project is a 20-year mission to orbit and
photograph the moon, and that is not set for launching until 2015. As for the
landing and drilling stages of the project, if they come to pass at all, they
will occur much further down the line, ''for the next generations,'' as Bada
puts it, ''the kids that aren't even born yet.''

Whatever clues Europa's watery depths might yield -- or Mars's rocks, or the
detritus of Wild 2, or the fiery and frigid recesses of our own planet, for
that matter, and the yet-unknown twists and turns of our own DNA -- the sense
now is that we, or at least the kids that aren't even born yet, are in for a
whole new way of seeing. It's fine but ultimately facile to believe that solving
the mystery of life's origins would help to solve anything else about our
lives -- to draw our collective focus away from fundamentalist or nationalist
fervor, for example, or from anyone's claim to higher authority or birthright, all
births having been definitely traced back to a natural brand of fire and
brimstone more fearsome than that found in any book. It would be nonsensical to
think that, even in our own little patch of time, an almost unfathomable sense
of collective liberation and comfort could be found from being able to look up
at the stars at night and see not the constellations of old, but at once the
beginning and the future of all existence, the ongoing impulse, if not the
sound itself, of life's initial utterance.

Still, what science has already revealed to us about our own biology's inward
microcosm should both give us pause and offer us new paradigms. The cell, for
example, is at once a very apt metaphor and cautionary tale for civilization,
with its long history of microorganisms forged in a primordial hellfire and
then gathered inside protective outer walls for the sake of greater cooperation
and complexity.

''Things are in the saddle,/And ride mankind,'' Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in
a poem warning against the soul-withering effects of civilization's excesses.
Knowing what we do now, however, about life's beginnings, the word ''things''
takes on a whole new meaning. And should our internal extremophiles eventually
ride or override us (as human behavior sometimes suggests they are doing)
into recreating the very fires from which they first emanated, there is, perhaps,
some comfort to be found in astrobiology's revelation that our own rugged
ancestors will be around to inherit this earth and start the entire cycle over
again.


Charles Siebert is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author,
most recently, of ''A Man After His Own Heart: A True Story.''

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