'Sniffing Out' Extraterrestrial Life

July 13 -- We’ve looked for E.T. but haven’t seen him, and we’ve listened but haven’t heard him, so now scientists are working on a plan to see if they can “sniff” him out.

It’s not exactly as though they expect to detect his under-tentacle deodorant. Instead, they hope to inhale a few molecules on some distant celestial body and see if those molecules are specific proteins that bear the clear signature of life.

Library of Life

It’s all the brainchild of Marilyn Fogel, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and she has a lot of work laid out for her in the years to come. First, she has to build a complete library of heavy molecules, such as proteins, here on Earth. Then, she needs to show which molecules resulted from non-biological processes and which are proteins that show the presence of life.

“This will be five years of work,” Fogel says, and that’s just for the first stage. After completing her “library,” Fogel expects a device similar to the one she is using for her ambitious project to be shipped off to Mars or some other object in our solar system to see what it can find.

It all began about three years ago when she was a member of the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. The board was being briefed by NASA on plans to bring back a sample from Mars to see if it contained any evidence of life.

“This was very disturbing to me,” she says, because she thought NASA had put the cart before the horse. It would make more sense, she concluded, to come up with some sort of gadget that could do the same thing while still on the surface of Mars.

Without doing that first, she asked NASA, how could you know which samples were worth bringing back?

It would also be a lot cheaper than hauling a bag full of rocks back from Mars that might turn out to be of little value. But unfortunately no one knew just how to isolate and analyze proteins on the surface of Mars without shipping an entire laboratory to the Red Planet.