Celebrate

From
Date
                             Celebrate!

        Here in its entirety is an editorial which may be of
interest to members of this board:  it concerns the recent hoopla
regarding extraterrestrial life.  This suggests something very
important about the funding of science.

                        ++++++++++


 \Editor, "'Mars Mania' and the Right to Celebrate," Nature 382
(15 August 1996), p. 563.\

THE space science community has just enjoyed one of the finest
weeks imaginable, basking in the reflected glory of a result that
tentatively suggests that there was once life on Mars - capped by
a ringing endorsement of its work delivered by an ebullient US
president on the White House lawn.  Yet parts of the community
respond as though they had just been mugged.

     Scientists of many disciplines are sceptical about the
evidence presented by McKay et al, no single strand of which is
either conclusive or even unique.  People from the US National
Science Foundation's Antarctic Program - which found the rock -
and other scientists related to the project feel usurped by the
typically brazen manner in which the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) has sought to take all the credit for
itself.  Stephen Jay Gould, writing in Sunday's New York Times,
points out that the result comes as no surprise to
palaeontologists such as himself and asks, in effect, what all
the fuss is about.

     What is all the fuss about?  The paper to be published
tomorrow in Science presents several separate strands of evidence
and argues that, in combination, they "could be fossil remains of
past Martian biota".  Individually, the different strands do not
amount to much (see pages 575-576) but, the authors say, "when
they are considered collectively, particularly in view of their
spatial association, we conclude that they are evidence for
primitive life on early Mars".

     At which point, enter Dan Goldin, NASA's rhetorically gifted
administrator.  Goldin has a treacle-filled yarn for every
occasion: on 7 August, the grandest one of all, he told the
world's media of a telephone conversation the previous evening
with his ailing father in Florida.  If nothing else, he said, the
pending announcement of this scientific discovery had lifted his
father's spirits.

     For once, Goldin's story rings perfectly true - and that is
what all the fuss is about.  The entire population is gripped in
fascination by the contents of this piece of rock - especially
the very young and very old, less absorbed than the rest of us in
the daily banalities of earning a living.  Their fascination runs
through all the generations, from the eight-year-old child who
earnestly informed the CNN television channel that the paper
cannot be right, because the meteorite came from the wrong part
of the Red Planet (how he knew this is unrecorded) to Dan
Goldin's father.

     Modern science is nothing more nor less than the operating
arm of the population's insatiable curiosity.  This may seem
obvious, but, from some of the ways science has been trying to
sell itself of late, one would never guess as much.  Bereft of
its alleged former mission of fighting the Cold War, it is most
often presented as a means of fighting an imaginary economic war
between various countries that are demonstrably at peace with one
another and whose economies are mutually dependent.  On other
days, science is pitched (not very convincingly) as a route to
cheaper health care, or as the saviour of an overstressed global
ecosystem.

     With the demise of the corporately funded basic research
laboratory and of the Soviet Union, virtually all scientific
research is now paid for by the public, through its elected
'representatives.  The public should pay for science because the
people want to explore the frontiers of knowledge.  If the people
ever tire of such exploration - of if their tedious yearnings are
beneath the consideration of scientists - then the funding should
cease.  But even in this jaded age, last week's events should
that the public's curiosity is as vibrant as ever.

     So what if there has been no life on Mars, and the
expectations raised in every corner of this planet by the McKay
el al paper are gradually deflated by further study?  Then we
will still be left to ponder the response of the people (pursued
breathlessly by politicians and the press) to the possibility of
progress, and a timely reminder of what science is for.  As
Margaret Thatcher once said: "Rejoice."

 A. C. Higgins
  SS 359  SUNYA  Albany, New York 12222
  ACH13@CNSVAX.Albany.edu
  Phone: (518) 442 - 4678; FAX: (518) 442 - 4936
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