http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/science/story.jsp?story=75186
Protect us from Mars life forms, scientists tell Bush
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
30 May 2001
Space scientists have warned President George Bush to build a high-security laboratory to protect the Earth from extraterrestrial life forms when returning spaceships carry rock samples from Mars.
A high-level committee of scientific advisers has recommended that such a quarantine facility should be built without delay. The committee said it should be run by a dedicated team of highly trained personnel who were familiar with the technical procedures needed to limit the risk that alien microbes might pose to life on Earth.
Although the scientists believe the risk from an unknown biohazard is low, they admit it is "not zero". They want the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to build a new laboratory with unprecedented biological barriers, to prevent the escape of an "Andromeda strain" into an unsuspecting world.
The committee recommends three possible sites in America for the new lab: the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia; the US Army Medical Research Institute in Fort Detrick, Maryland; or the University of Texas in Galveston, which also has experience of working with dangerous organisms.
John Wood, the chairman of the Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration of the US National Research Council (NRC), said the new laboratory should be the most stringent type of containment facility available known as biosafety laboratory level 4 (BSL-4) currently used for handling the most deadly diseases, such as the Ebola virus.
But whereas existing BSL-4 laboratories have to guard against the escape of microbes, the new space-quarantine facility also has to be a "clean room". It must protect the extraterrestrial rocks against possible contamination with terrestrial organisms, which would upset the scientific scrutiny of the alien life forms.
Clean rooms are usually kept at an air pressure slightly higher than the outside, so that things can leave but not enter. But a containment facility is kept at a slightly lower air pressure to prevent an escape. Marrying the two requirements presents an unprecedented technical challenge.
Dr Wood, a senior scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said: "Building this type of quarantine facility is a project of enormous complexity. We strongly recommend that this process gets under way as soon as possible."
Recent evidence that life may exist beyond Earth had spurred Nasa into requesting the NRC to investigate what was needed for the safe return of Martian rocks, as well as samples from other places in the Solar System where life might exist, such as Ganymede and Europa, two of the moons of Jupiter. Dr Wood said: "The question of whether life exists on other planets is not a new one. Nor is the question frivolous. Recent evidence of ancient water on the surface of Mars and an ocean on Jupiter's moon, Europa, compels us to entertain the notion, however remote, that Earth is not the only planet in the Solar System capable of sustaining life."
The committee, which included some of the leading authorities on astronomy, planet- ary science and biology, said that the quarantine problems had to be solved soon, to begin building the laboratory in time for the return of the first Martian rocks in 2014.
Dr Wood said building and preparing the laboratory would take at least seven years. "Because many questions still need to be resolved before design and construction can even begin, it is essential for work to commence as soon as possible in order to be ready in time for the first samples' return. A prime, and perhaps the only, means to provide a definitive answer to the life-on-Mars question is to retrieve surface samples for detailed laboratory studies," Dr Wood explained.
The committee said that rock samples should be released from the containment laboratory only if they were properly sterilised with heat or gamma radiation, and they should never be released if they contained "unmistakable evidence of life".
The scientists are anxious to avoid a repetition of the lunar rock fiasco 30 years ago, in which quarantine measures were breached. An NRC report into the affair, published in 1997, said: "It was evident from the Apollo experience that the science team, and the lunar receiving facility, would have been more effective if the team members had had prior experience together on common problems, before receiving lunar samples."
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