In the mid-1990s, NASA was facing a massive cutback from Congress. In 1994 the agency’s administrator, Daniel Goldin, had sent a report in which he proposed a reduction of 15,000 million dollars in five years. A considerable adjustment, considering that NASA was then spending 14,000 million dollars annually. Two years later he had to reduce the budget again, redesigning the International Space Station and canceling projects. It was the “good, nice and cheap” era of space research .
The air smelled of disaster in all the centers of the North American space agency. In particular there was a field that did not promise them very happy: the life sciences. The few resources available were to be dedicated to specific missions and, knowing that NASA is dominated by physicists and engineers, questions related to biology had little future . But then Lynn Harper, director of the Advanced Life Support Division at NASA Ames Research Center had a bright idea. He designed a whole new strategy where he argued that interdisciplinary research was more important, and even more productive, than the traditional corseted structures of science. This approach was to allow the Ames to focus on a single subject: life in the universe . And the move worked.
A change of strategy
Since the creation of the Office of Life Sciences in 1960, NASA had assumed as its own the search for life outside planet Earth. It was then called exobiology , a term coined by the geneticist and Nobel Prize winner for Medicine Joshua Lederberg in his article Exobiology: experimental approaches to Life beyond Earth , published that year in the prestigious journal Science . From the moment of its creation, the ridicule did not stop and the critics did not fail to remember that it was the only science without an object of study . If you wanted the new strategy to prosper, you had to do a 180º turn and get rid of that name with a strong negative charge. The new term was life in the universe , and it was that emphasis on biology that most convinced Daniel Goldin.
In the first months of 1995 the Ames Research Center escaped disaster. The change of direction was impressive: from a drastic and almost fatal cut, he went on to lead a new research program: astrobiology. It had to be defined and in NASA’s 1996 Strategic Plan, the first official document where that name appeared, it was defined as “the study of the living universe” aimed at three themes: the origin and distribution of life in the universe, the role of gravity in living systems and the study of the earth’s atmosphere and its ecosystems. All of them were already working at NASA but the chef’s touch was interdisciplinarity : sharing knowledge and resources in search of new paths.
Exoplanets and Martian life
After the stroke of the rudder came the stroke of luck. Two news that filled the pages of the newspapers gave wings to this new science. The first was the announcement in October 1995 of the discovery of the first planet orbiting a star , 51 Pegasi. The second, that Mars had harbored life at some point in its history. In late 1995, the team led by David McKay, Kathie Thomas-Keptra, and Everett Gibson thought their analysis of the Martian meteorite ALH 84001 proved the existence of remnants of Martian life . Once his paper was accepted by Science magazine, on August 7, 1996, NASA announced it to great fanfare. Its administrator, Daniel Goldin, began the press conference like this: “NASA has made an important discovery.” President Clinton said it was one of the most important finds in history, and his Vice President Al Gore was enthusiastic. The NASA team had not only discovered remnants of biological activity, but also what looked like fossils of bacteria.
The media impact of the press conference meant a relaunch of space missions . Now there was a goal: to find out if there had ever been life on Mars. Astrobiology became, thanks to a failed investigation, a fashionable science. And in 1998 the NASA Astrobiology Institute was created. The focus is very clear: place life in the context of planetary history, search for new solar systems, analyze the signatures that life would leave on a planet, and study the past, present, and future of life.
Astrobiology radically departs from the other sciences; instead of hyperspecialization it demands generalist minds , Renaissance scientists. “The discovery of a new life form by a paleontologist from a billion years ago in a rock in Africa has important consequences for a planetary geologist studying Mars…the most disparate alliances are being formed, and the walls that have constrained to science in its disciplines”, affirm emphatically the astrobiologists P. Ward and D. Brownlee. This is its greatest strength and its greatest danger, as scientists are not used to thinking and working in this way.
Reference:
Dick, S. J. (2005) The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology, Rutgers University Press
