13 Things That Don't Make Sense (14 page)

IF
there is no way to make the Wow! Signal make sense, there is also no way to invoke the other golden rule of science: repeat
the observation. Today, there is no publicly funded search for alien intelligence—and there is no Big Ear. In 1988 the telescope
was dismantled to make way for a luxury golf course. John Kraus, Big Ear’s designer, learned Ohio Wesleyan University had
sold the ground out from beneath his beloved telescope on December 28, 1982. He called it a day of infamy.“Ohio Wesleyan betrayed
my trust and sold the land out from under the ‘Big Ear,’ ” he wrote in April 2004. “What other discoveries and measurements
might have been made if the telescope had not been demolished?” The fact is, there had been nothing more than a gentleman’s
agreement between Ohio Wesleyan University and Ohio State University, whose faculty had built the telescope. The local papers
raised an uproar, and the OWU president resigned shortly afterward. The astronomers got together and offered the developers
four times the land’s value. The protests and the efforts, ultimately, made no difference.

Money, greed, and ambition have continually thwarted the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Somehow, it seems more
open to attack than any other branch of science. Perhaps because, as such a long shot, it is so vulnerable to cheap shots.

The first really cheap shot against SETI was fired just six months after the Wow! Signal hit Earth. Senator William Proxmire
was looking for another recipient for his infamous Golden Fleece Awards. He handed them out to government-funded projects
that he considered a waste of taxpayers’ money. It was a great PR campaign for Proxmire, giving the voters exactly what they
were looking for at the end of a difficult decade, but it wasn’t always easy to keep coming up with targets—especially when
he had committed himself to issuing one a month.

NASA’s turn came around in February 1978 “for proposing to spend $14 to $25 million over the next seven years to try to find
intelligent life in outer space.” Scientifically, there was never anything wrong with the idea. The badly titled (by today’s
snazzy science-PR standards) “Microwave Observing Program” (MOP) had the support of mainstream scientists, and it had a moderate
annual budget of around $1.5 million; it was a sensible effort to use microwave receivers to look for anomalous signals from
outer space. Nevertheless, Proxmire’s attention made it vulnerable, and, in 1982, he went in for the kill, tabling a legislative
amendment that cut all federal funding for MOP. Fortunately, Carl Sagan came to the rescue.

Sagan’s influence can be measured in TV viewing figures. His series
Cosmos
, produced in 1979, was the most-watched public program in America until the 1990s. Around 600 million people have seen the
series and gained Sagan’s charismatic, inspiring, and breathtaking perspective on the universe. When, in 1982, Sagan met with
Proxmire, he was at the height of his influence. Proxmire listened to Sagan’s arguments in favor of SETI and backed down—he
even apologized. Sagan followed up with a PR campaign of his own, backed up by a petition signed by some of the world’s most
respected scientists (with seven Nobel laureates among them), and cemented the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in
the American mind as a worthwhile—even a necessary—scientific endeavor. No wonder, then, that Nevada senator Richard Bryan
refused to meet with SETI astronomers when he launched his attack on the program a decade later.

On October 6, 1992, the
New York Times
was enthralled by the prospect of a new extraterrestrial frontier for America.

ASTRONOMERS, moving beyond philosophical musings and science-fiction fantasy, are about to mount the first comprehensive,
high-technology search for evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The new search is scheduled to begin symbolically
on Monday, the 500th anniversary of the day Columbus happened on the shores of America.

Almost exactly a year later, the same paper expressed a numb shock under the headline “ET, Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You.
Someday.”

LAST year, on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival, NASA announced a 10-year project to scan the skies for radio waves
emitted by alien civilizations. As Columbus Day 1993 comes around, the program is being canceled, the $1 million a month needed
to sustain it eliminated from the budget.

The writer George Johnson could not resist stretching the analogy.

It was as though the Great Navigator, having barely sailed beyond the Canary Islands, was yanked home by Queen Isabella, who
decided that, on second thought, she’d rather keep her jewels.

This disaster for SETI was due to Bryan. He had tabled a late-night amendment to a bill that killed the funding. In support
of his amendment, Bryan made the facile comment that “millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green
fellow. Not a single Martian has said take me to your leader, and not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.”

This time SETI’s champions could do nothing. Seth Shostak, now director of the SETI Institute, the privately funded successor
to NASA’s SETI, recalls that they requested meetings with Senator Bryan, but Bryan wouldn’t take them. Bryan’s amendment
went through, and the publicly funded effort to answer the biggest question on Earth was over. It never recovered; the
New York Times
registered its amazement at the shortsightedness of the move, but nothing changed. Public funding of SETI was finished.

At present, the money pot for SETI is provided almost exclusively by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. When SETI lost its funding
in 1993, Barney Oliver, the head of Hewlett-Packard’s research and development division and the man who gave the world the
pocket calculator, made some calls. Oliver’s true love was not technology but astronomy and, in particular, SETI, and he got
Bill Hewlett and David Packard to make a contribution to keep SETI’s head above water.

It is entrepreneurs like Hewlett and Packard who, for reasons no one quite understands, have kept SETI alive to this day;
their contributions have allowed SETI people to buy a little telescope time and to pay a few salaries. But Hewlett and Packard
are now dead, and it is another of Oliver’s contacts, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, who is the main source of funding. Nevertheless,
the construction of the SETI Institute’s very own telescope—the Allen Telescope Array—is stalling because Allen feels his
contribution should be matched by public funds, and no one with control over a public purse is willing to give any money for
the construction.

It’s easy to see why people who are accountable for public money might shy away from funding a search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. Jerry Ehman admits it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack—“except that you don’t know where the haystack
is, and you don’t even know for sure there’s a needle in it.” It’s true that the search for intelligent aliens relies on a
barrage of assumptions, and one has to hope that some of them are not too wrong. But the same could be said of the search
for extrasolar planets—a venture that has no trouble getting public money.

Take the current vogue for finding planets within the Goldilocks zone. When we stop and think about our limited appreciation
of what life might be like, and what conditions it can thrive under, that whole set of criteria based on the existence of
liquid water stars to look pretty shaky.

Liquid water is not a necessary requirement for life to exist and flourish; in some circumstances it can be the kiss of death.
Sulphuric acid might do the job for other forms of biology, for example; the atmosphere of Venus is rather like a cloud of
battery acid, and scientists have speculated that its acid droplets could harbor life. That’s precisely because there is no
water around. It is water that makes sulphuric acid corrosive; in fact, the acid is a catalyst for the corrosion reaction,
known as
hydrolysis
, where water splits protein molecules.

Similarly, engineers have found that some biological enzymes used in industrial chemistry work in the hydrocarbon fluid hexane
as well as in water. There is even a chance that biology can work without carbon; its near-relation silicon can also act as
the scaffold on which biological molecules are built. On Earth, water and carbon are abundant, and silicon is locked up in
the planet’s rocky crust—sand, for instance, is mostly silicon. It’s no surprise, then, that terrestrial life is carbon- and
water-based. On other worlds, however, the kinds of distant worlds we are straining to see, there might be a sandman staring
back at us. And those silicon-based eyes might well have developed far from the Goldilocks zone.

If the development of sand- or sulphuric acid–based life broadens the criteria for the search for other habitats, it also
makes SETI’s job much harder; the communication is even more likely to be something we haven’t considered possible. But just
as it hasn’t stopped the search for life-harboring extrasolar planets, neither does it render SETI pointless.

There have been attempts to do that. Perhaps most famous is the remark that the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi made in 1950:
“Where is everybody?” Fermi’s point was that, for all the vast reaches of space and the almost limitless possibilities for
intelligent life to develop in the universe, we have not encountered any aliens or alien communications. Many answers have
been raised to the Fermi Paradox, including suggestions that aliens might not want to visit or communicate with us, or that
they are already living among us, but the most compelling explanations are that we are not really looking or listening, and
if we were, we wouldn’t necessarily know what to look or listen for.

It is certainly true that we don’t know what a deliberate signal would look like. Morrison and Cocconi’s idea seems to hold
water but could be rather primitive. If an alien civilization is advanced enough to be beaming speculative signals into space
on a regular basis, it’s likely to be far more advanced than we are. To them, our ideas of what makes a good signal may be
the equivalent of smoke signals or semaphore: hopelessly outmoded and inadequate.

Our best hope would be that the aliens communicate using a mathematical code—a string of prime numbers or the digits of pi,
or some other cipher we believe to be a universal experience. But there are other options. A project at Harvard University
uses spectra gathered from optical telescopes to search for signatures of “always on” laser light beamed from deep space.
A Berkeley project is looking at 2,500 nearby stars for pulses of laser light that might have been emitted by a distant civilization.
Most SETI projects, including the Allen Telescope Array when it is up and running, look for Morrison and Cocconi’s narrowband
radio signal; although it would bear no information (at least none that we could detect using the current generation of instruments),
the repeated observation of such a signal might release enough funds for us to build radio telescopes that could decipher
any signal contained within it. Or that’s what the SETI Institute is hoping.

WHERE
does all this leave the Wow! Signal? Inconclusive. The fact that it came from an empty region of space, not somewhere known
to be a candidate for the development of alien life, means the best we can suggest is that it was a signal from an alien spacecraft,
perhaps an identifier beacon aimed momentarily and erroneously in our direction as a civilization migrated through the cosmos.
But here we stray into the realm of science fiction.

Interestingly, the SETI Institute Web site’s take on the Wow! Signal invokes another anomaly. “You wouldn’t believe cold fusion
unless researchers other than the discoverers could duplicate it in their labs. The same is true of extraterrestrial signals:
they are credible only when they can be found more than once.” Don’t take it at face value, it suggests, but do look for more
examples.

Are we looking? Not really. The search for aliens is for enthusiasts only. Considering what scientists say is at stake, this
ought to be a scandal. The Wow! Signal, if it is what it seems, is a classic Kuhnian anomaly: follow it up, and we could radically
alter our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. It would be Copernican in scale. And yet it is, effectively, ignored.

On the bright side, there is still hope for clarifying the nature of life and our place in its hierarchy—and it lies much
closer to home. If Martin Rees had his way, and SETI were to be modestly funded, it would lead us to examine the farthest
reaches of space for clues to the essential nature of life. But it turns out that another terrestrial anomaly could shed more
light on the matter. This creature—if it can be called that—bridges the gap between living and nonliving matter in a way that
has never been seen before, and analysis of its genetic code is rewriting the history of life on Earth.

It’s quite an achievement for a humble virus.

8

A GIANT VIRUS

It’s a freak that could rewrite the story of life

P
ity the poor souls responsible for drawing tourists to Bradford, Yorkshire. First there are the dark, satanic mills of the
city’s industrial past. Then there’s the fact that the Yorkshire Ripper, a notorious serial killer of prostitutes, lived here.
The Brontë sisters were born and lived part of their lives nearby, but their lives were hardly long or happy. Emily died from
tuberculosis at thirty, the year after
Wuthering Heights
was published. Charlotte, the creator of
Jane Eyre,
died at thirty-nine in the early stages of pregnancy. Today, in the United Kingdom at least, the city is better known as the
site of violent race riots in the summer of 2001.

And then there is what may turn out to be the city’s most important contribution to science. In 1992 Timothy Rowbotham, a
microbiologist with the United Kingdom’s Public Health Laboratory Service, was charged with finding the root of a particularly
nasty outbreak of pneumonia in Bradford. His detective work led him to sample the water at the base of a hospital cooling
tower. When he took his samples back to the lab, he found they contained amoebae. That was unsurprising in itself, but the
amoebae seemed to have been infected by something, some microbe, that he couldn’t identify. Rowbotham named it
Bradford coccus
, perhaps one of the least glamorous epithets ever given. Not that Rowbotham cared. He had other things to do; he put the
unidentified microbe in deep freeze and moved on to the next job.

Eleven years later we learned that Rowbotham had found a monster virus. It is by far the biggest virus known to science; it
is huge, around thirty times bigger than the rhinovirus that gives you a common cold. And it is staggeringly hard to kill.
Most viruses can be destroyed by high temperatures or strong alkalis, or shaken to pieces by sound waves—but not this one.
That’s not what has made scientists sit up and take notice, however. This giant virus’s biggest impact won’t be on the health-care
systems of the globe. It will be on the history of life on Earth.

WE
have only known about viruses for around a hundred years. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Dimitri Ivanovski, a Russian
biologist, was sent to find out what was blighting the Crimean tobacco crop. Whatever it was, it was getting through the porcelain
filters the laboratory technicians were using to sift out bacteria. In 1892 Ivanovski published an article describing the
new, minuscule kind of pathogen he had found. Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutch microbiologist, eventually gave the pathogen a
suitable name in 1898:
virus
—a Latin word meaning a slimy liquid or poison.

Though the virus trail was blazed by two Europeans, it was an American who got the most recognition. In 1946 Wendell Meredith
Stanley won a Nobel Prize after isolating the tobacco mosaic virus. Interestingly, Stanley’s Nobel was for chemistry. Though
they affect living systems, viruses have almost always been seen as merely chemical, not biological. In fact, they are viewed
as almost mechanical: vicious, brutal, violent, powerful machines, hell-bent on reproducing themselves, but unable to achieve
this on their own. Viruses can’t exist without a living host to make proteins and energy for them. They are evolutionary aberrations
whose existence necessitates destruction, rather like the cruelly amoral machines in the movie
The Terminator
. They are not part of the web of life.

There’s just one problem with this traditional view, however, and it is sitting in a freezer in Marseille.

MARSEILLE,
the oldest city in France, is now a world center for disease research. That expertise most likely arose because, when the
city was founded by the Phoenicians in 600 BCE, and its harbor opened a gateway to the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the
West Indies, it also opened a gateway to the plague: the first cases of bubonic plague arrived in Marseille in the year 543.

Plague is another example of the finely honed capabilities of the microorganism. Inside its flea-host, the plague bacteria
multiply and block the entrance to the stomach. The flea can’t be sated, no matter how much blood it sucks from its own host—usually
a rodent—and so it feeds madly. The blood reaches the bacterial plug and is then vomited back up, laced with bacteria that
infect the next thing the flea bites. And so it goes on. And on and on.

In 1346 a boat from the Middle East brought another plague to Marseille; the eventual European death toll was 25 million.
We have short memories, though, and are motivated more by greed than by common sense. When, in 1720, a boat arrived in Marseille
with several known cases of plague on board, the port authorities put it under quarantine, but the city’s merchants wanted
to trade its cargo of silk without delay. They put pressure on the authorities, who lifted the quarantine order. Thus began
Marseille’s Great Plague. Within two years, fifty thousand people had died in the city—more than half the population. Another
fifty thousand died in the regions north of the city. No wonder the disease researchers in the medical faculty of Marseille’s
Université de la Méditerranée are among the finest in the world.

The president of the university is Didier Raoult. His biography reads like a list of things you’re glad someone else knows
about: he has degrees in bacteriology, virology, and parasitology. He has scraped out the teeth from plague victims; at the
turn of the millennium, while the rest of us were planning the ultimate New Year’s Eve party, he was picking out DNA from
the teeth of exhumed fourteenth-century skeletons in order to test whether they were killed by a bacterial plague or a deadly
Ebola-like virus. Raoult is passionate about pathogens. So when Timothy Rowbotham offered to send him a freeze-dried bacterium
that defied all attempts at classification, of course he said yes. He couldn’t have known then just what a mire he was stepping
into.

First, the sample went under a microscope. Rowbotham was right; it certainly looked like a bacterium. Next, it passed the
standard test for bacteria: the Gram stain. This is a series of chemical stains applied to a sample suspected to contain bacteria.
It always comes up pink or purple for bacteria. Raoult’s sample came up purple.

That’s why Bernard La Scola, a bacteriologist in Raoult’s group, took the next step and set out to classify exactly what kind
of bacterium they were dealing with. This involves another standard routine that probes a molecule called
ribosomal RNA
, which helps the bacterium make proteins. Unfortunately, the sample didn’t have the molecule in question. Nearly thirty searches
later, La Scola still hadn’t found it. So he took the cover off his electron microscope—a thousand times more powerful than
his standard optical microscope—to have a closer look. And that is when he was confronted with a monster.

The bacterium was in fact not a bacterium. It was a giant virus. The team christened it “Mimi”; when they announced their
discovery in
Science
in March 2003, the team said they chose the name because it is a mimic, closely resembling a bacterium. (Raoult subsequently
admitted there is a less clinical side to the naming, however: his father used to make up stories centered on an amoeba called
Mimi. Since the giant virus was first discovered inside an amoeba, to Raoult, it seemed sweetly appropriate.) The announcement
took just one page; it simply said the French researchers had found the largest example of a
nucleocytoplasmic large DNA virus
(
NCLDV
).

Biologists have a number of classifications for viruses. There is even a committee, the International Committee on Taxonomy
of Viruses, that takes into account the viral properties in order to put it in the proper group. The committee considers issues
such as the type of nucleic acid (RNA or DNA), the type of host, the shape of the capsid shell that encloses the genome, and
so on. DNA viruses—herpes, smallpox, and varicella zoster, the virus that causes chickenpox and shingles, are examples—have
a genome composed of DNA that sits within a protective protein coating. The NCLDV classification denotes the larger viruses
in this group, and the Marseille giant virus is the largest of them all. Imagine standing next to a man who’s the height of
a twelve-story office building. That, to most other viruses, is what this freak looks like.

The view down Bernard La Scola’s electron microscope shows Mimi—like all viruses—looks like some kind of crystal. It doesn’t
look baggy, like a cell or a bacterium. It looks like something that has arranged its structure according to neat architectural
principles. Its head is an icosohedron, multifaceted, like a well-cut gemstone. It looks well-organized, disciplined.

And it is. Unlike other viruses, it has a genome that is a model of restraint. Where most viruses have a headful of “junk”
DNA that seems to serve no purpose, most of Mimivirus’s genes perform well-defined tasks. And what tasks. There are genes,
for example, that encode for the instructions and apparatus for making proteins. This violates biological dogma straightaway;
viruses are supposed to let their hosts make the proteins. Some of the protein-making apparatus in Mimivirus is exactly the
same as you’d find in all the things we call “alive.” There are also genes for repairing and untangling DNA, for metabolizing
sugars, and for protein folding—an essential step in the construction of life. The Marseille researchers found Mimivirus is
the proud owner of a grand total of 1,262 genes. (The typical virus has 100 or so, but only uses around 10.) Scientists had
never seen somewhere near half of them before, which has the Marseille researchers excited. However, it is the ones they
had
seen before that are causing the most fuss. To understand why, we have to go back to 1758, when Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist,
published the tenth edition of his revolutionary book,
Systema natura
.

Linnaeus’s volume did away with the simple but unenlightening system of his day for naming and grouping biological organisms.
Instead, Linnaeus grouped organisms by their shared physical characteristics. In many ways he laid the groundwork for Charles
Darwin; Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection also examined why different organisms should share certain physical
characteristics and arrived at the conclusion that if things look alike they are probably related in some way. Suddenly we
had the notion of a tree of life, and we could start to think about tracing our ancestors.

Instead of everything having one (often very long) name, Linnaeus gave them two short ones. The first was its
genus
:
Homo
, for example. The second was the
species
, the subdivision that separates the members of a genus:
sapiens
, for example, or
erectus
. It was a neat system and is still biology’s best. Though most of us are more familiar with
gray wolf
than
Canis lupus
, for some organisms Linnaeus’s system provides the only familiar name:
Tyrannosaurus rex
, for example, or
Escherichia
(better known as
E
.)
coli
.

The next classification revolution came in the 1970s, when Carl Woese looked beyond physical characteristics. Woese used the
emerging technology of gene sequencing to allow grouping by shared characteristics in the genomes of various species. In doing
so, he dared to redraw the tree of life.

At the beginning of that decade, life was thought to have had only two types of contenders. There were the
eukaryotes
, the advanced organisms like animals and plants whose large and complex cells contained a nucleus that held inheritable information.
The other branch was the simpler
prokaryotes
, such as bacteria, which have cells without a nucleus.

In 1977, however, Woese published a paper that suggested the prokaryotes should split. He had been sequencing the genomes
of various microorganisms, and something just didn’t fit. A group of microbes called
archaea
were genetically distinct from bacteria; in fact they were genetically more like the eukaryotes. The archaea, which were characterized
by living in high-temperature environments or emitting methane, might look similar to the bacteria, Woese said, but genetics
said they represent a completely different evolutionary path. There were three kingdoms, not two. We now know archaean organisms
constitute a huge proportion of the planet’s biomass—one estimate has it at 20 percent. Their signature is a seemingly inhospitable
habitat.
Halobacterium
, for example, thrives in saline water. Others live in the intestines of cows, in hot sulphurous springs, in deep ocean trenches
feeding off the black smoker vents, in petroleum reserves … the list goes on.

Woese’s paper, published with his University of Illinois colleague George Fox, has an angry tone. It reads like a wake-up
call to biologists; he speaks of the path to the tree of life being “obscured” by a narrow-minded scientific worldview. The
words
prejudice
,
without evidence
,
taken for granted
come up. They talk of biologists’
predilection
for simplistic dichotomies: plant vs animal; eukaryote vs prokaryote. But the biological world is not bipartite—eukaryote
or prokaryote—the researchers announced. “Rather, it is (at least) tripartite.”