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Infinity Beckoned
Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969â"1989
By Jay Gallentine UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Jay Gallentine
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8515-6
CHAPTER 1
Beach Brainstorm
Good ideas are common. What's uncommon are people who'll work hard enough to bring them about.
— Ashleigh Brilliant
Way back in 1951 Gilbert Levin was out for a morning drive.
Sunny, cheerful weather. Nearly perfect. At the wheel of a state-issue Jeep, the agile twenty-seven-year-old adroitly crawled his way along Santa Monica's famous beachfront, gazing around at everything before him. This was his job.
"A very nice one," he pointed out.
Santa Monica beaches offered much in the way of visual amusements. He watched people, appraised the endlessly restyling beach sands, embraced the busy soundtrack of surf and life. From the breezy air he caught whiffs of tanning oils and food vendors and garbage and seawater. Especially the water. Briny, outdoorsy, fishy. The water was why he'd come.
Every hundred yards or so Levin would brake and hop from the Jeep, ambling his rail-thin self on down by the water's edge to carefully fill one miniature, sterilized bottle with a sample of liquid prized by Southern California bathers. The bottle received a handwritten label and went into a case with others to wait patiently for the next sample to join their group — from down the beach another hundred yards or so.
Levin did this most every week. And that day, after yet another morning of said activity, he swung the Jeep around and trucked over to the California State Health Department's laboratory. There the bottles went into the hands of trained biologists who tested each sample in order to quantitatively establish how dirty the water was. Specifically, everyone felt most concerned about microbes of E. coli — that is, human feces. Were they swarming, or sparse? Test outcomes were used by Health Department officials to judge whether the water currently seemed unpolluted enough to swim in. "Based on the results, we established quarantine limits," explained Gil Levin. "At that time, this was very important because raw sewage from Los Angeles was being spilled out onto the beach." Citizens expected regular reports on water quality, and in this fashion the Health Department gave it to them. If, in 1951, you ever had to abort a Santa Monica beach outing due to signs proclaiming QUARANTINED, UNSAFE FOR SWIMMING, well ... you can thank Gil Levin.
He liked the job — except for one bothersome problem, which hadn't fully coalesced inside Levin's active brain until that very morning: "We don't get the results of our tests for about a week," he grumbled. "So when we establish a boundary, it's based on last week's water quality, not the current water quality." So what good was any of this, then? People weren't swimming in last week's water. And that bothered Gilbert Levin very much. Having been fascinated with sanitary engineering since high school, not to mention having made it the focus of his college years, Levin was prone to get excitable about such trivialities. He pondered the issue more and more, this dilemma of testing time. How to speed things up? How to produce a more relevant water forecast?
Nice jobs don't always last. Within a year Levin moved back to the Washington DC area where he'd grown up and took a new job in public health engineering. Now he faced the greater responsibility of ensuring a safe and clean municipal water supply. No longer did his position involve sunny drives and leisurely collections of water from public beaches, yet Gil Levin was not a fellow who dismissed unresolved problems. It wasn't in his nature. So, despite the three thousand miles of Santa Monica separation, this troublesome matter of delayed water-quality results came surging back to command his attention.
He reconsidered the overall process. In a lab, techs had combined Levin's beach-water samples with something called a nutrient, consisting of vitamins and sugar and amino acids. Think of it as a growth stimulant, available by mail order in huge bags of ready-mix powder. For use it had to be sterilized. Any bacteria in the water ate this stuff — generating carbon dioxide in the process — and at some point they'd start giving off bubbles. So the California techs had to sit around for days upon end waiting to see if any little toots started forming in the dosed water samples. The greater the levels of bacteria, the greater the frothing.
"Evidence of their metabolism," clarified Gil Levin.
But to him it all seemed so darn slow and archaic. The quandary got him to thinking about a course he'd recently taken. In those days, postwar America occupied much of its time fretting about the potentiality of nuclear war with the Soviets. Endless articles jabbered about preparing for war, living through atomic bombings, surviving the fallout. And Levin's class had explored the handling of public radiation exposure.
"I got to know something about isotopes," he mentioned.
One day his frustrations over the water-testing method fused with his knowledge of isotopes to generate an idea that maybe you could somehow "mark" or "tag" the nutrient with low-level radioactivity. If it worked the way he thought it would, carbon dioxide gas coming off the water sample would be ever-so-slightly radioactive, and therefore a whole lot easier to detect because even your basic el cheapo Geiger counter measured radiation in unbelievably small quantities. So, wouldn't that dramatically speed up the testing process?
Levin called around to nearby chemical supply houses and amusingly discovered that he could order up lightly radioactive carbon-14 glucose. "It's a sugar that almost everything eats — from microorganisms to people," he indicated. "There are many companies that make that." And the prospect of doing what he proposed now seemed ridiculously easy. Just take a pinch of the nuked-up glucose — "That's all it takes," he assured — and stir it into the regular nutrient. Then park a Geiger counter over the sample, run the test as usual, and wait no more.
After piecing it all together, Levin mentioned the idea to his boss, who remarked, "Gee, that's not a bad idea." He really adored the concept. He liked it so much that he suggested Levin arrange a meeting with the dean of the medical school at Georgetown University (Levin's boss happened to know him). The two hit it off and in short order the dean presented Levin to the head of the school's Biochemistry Department, Walter Hess, who listened intently to the young charge before him and also pronounced the idea to be a sound one.
"Why don't you write a proposal?" came Hess's suggestion.
Levin went blank. "What's a proposal?"
Hess explained. If some governmental body were to show interest in this concept, Levin might obtain funding in order to conduct a smattering of research. But first the government had to be sold on the idea, and that's where a proposal came in. Think of it as a detailed sales pitch, in writing.
Today Levin chuckles at his erstwhile naïveté. "I didn't even know what it was," he snickered. The men drafted up some paperwork and forwarded everything to the Atomic Energy Commission, which promptly sat on it. For a year. As Levin explained, "We had asked for the magnificent sum of sixty thousand dollars and they just couldn't make up their minds." Hess got so fed up with delays that he finally collected Levin and the two of them marched down the Washington Mall into the AEC's temporary offices and cornered the guy reviewing their work. It was a completely unannounced ambush.
"Look," spat Hess. "We're gonna cut mustard here. Either you're gonna fund this thing or we're pulling out."
The AEC guy thought a minute and offered, "Well, tell you what I'll do. I'll give you six thousand dollars."
Levin felt ecstatic. "We took it!"
Others shared in the enthusiasm. From the weekly schedule, his boss carved out a day for Levin to spend at Georgetown in the biochem lab. There, the ex–beach worker set up a rudimentary shop and hired a man to assist in conducting the first experiments.
"It was remarkable," cheered Levin, on these early tests. "They were immediately successful!"
Other people his age had been into cars, or sports, but not Gilbert Levin. How rare is that — an undistracted young man, wholly consumed by the selfless task of providing clean water to the general population?
Every Friday his labors would recommence on the new water-testing scheme. And the more time he spent refining its particulars, the more his positive outlook ballooned. "I felt, here was a method that could solve some major public health problems. Prevent epidemics." He could help a lot of people. He liked how that sounded.
But clean water was only the beginning.
Little did Gil Levin know that one day in the hazy future his radioactive brainstorm would signal the presence of life on Mars.
CHAPTER 2
What If ...
... you could, tomorrow morning, make water clean in the world? You would have done, in one fell swoop, the best thing you could have done for improving human health.
— American ecologist William C. Clark, in a speech
After refining the experiment as best he could, Gil Levin managed to publish a few low-key articles about using radioactive cuisine in testing water quality. The effort garnered little attention; he couldn't seem to coax any city councils, boards of directors, or other stagnant legislative bodies into implementing the process. "The threat of atomic radiation was so great at that time that none of the states would readily accept it. Nor would the U.S. Public Health Service." Levin didn't try very hard to disguise his irritation. "They wouldn't use it when the amount of radioactivity used was far less than you experience in an X-ray, and was less than the amount the Atomic Energy Commission, at that time, said you could drink!" Gee, didn't anyone like good ideas? About the best he could get were halfhearted promises from a few states to maybe try the method — if some unthinkably dire emergency arose in which they were in a complete pants-down situation.
"This really frustrated me."
Occasionally, however, preparation meets opportunity, and that's exactly what happened in the trailing weeks of 1958. Levin's wife, Karen, wrote for Newsweek magazine and that year the couple attended a Christmas party thrown by the periodical's Washington Bureau chief — who also invited somebody named Keith Glennan. By sheer coincidence Glennan just happened to be in charge of a new government entity called NASA.
Over martinis, Levin and Glennan small-talked their way through current events that included, for whatever reason, the topic of flying saucers. NASA's head honcho appeared social enough, so at one point Levin impulsively set down his martini and half-jokingly blurted, "Is NASA ever going to look for life on Mars?"
Glennan didn't seem the least bit fazed. "Strange you should ask that," he replied. "I've just hired an MD to set up a biology division, to do that."
Levin came right back with, "Well, I have an idea of how it might be done!"
Glennan seemed genuinely intrigued. "Well," came the response, "why don't you go down and see this guy, his name is Dr. Clark Randt, and I'll tell him you're gonna call."
"Great!"
What prompted Levin to ask was the sudden realization that his experiment wasn't so much about testing water quality as it was about hunting bacteria. And by doing so, he was essentially detecting the presence of life.
Jeepers — that's thorny business. As humans we seem to intrinsically know when things are alive, or not, but how is life even defined? How do you put a ruler on it? Objectively speaking, an entity judged to be "alive" has demonstrated the ability to consume, excrete, reproduce, and evolve. Leave any one of those out and you're in solid gray territory. (The first three criteria, for example, are met by fire.) Part of consumption is metabolism, or the process of converting food into energy. And metabolism is precisely what Gilbert Levin's magic idea happened to detect.
Of all the possibilities when trying to unmask a living system, why keep an eye on this one? Why not just set out a dish of food? Well, all known forms of life have to, in some fashion, process what's been ingested. A typical house cat isn't perpetually eating, or depositing another gift in its litter box, or even shedding — but it is constantly expending energy on activities like digestion or movement or growth or healing. So are we; it's involuntary. Go take a long nap and you're still metabolizing all the way through it. Metabolism indicates that an exchange of energy is taking place. One that affects an entire organism: its temperatures fluctuate; gases are released. And at a chemical level, what's transpiring is nearly identical among all known species. This continual and never-ending course of action can therefore be monitored much more easily than, say, waiting around for kitty to scarf up more Tender Vittles.
Presently Levin met up with Randt, who liked what he heard and requested a proposal. Slightly more savvy about such things, Levin produced one and less than a year later found himself the recipient of NASA seed money for the purposes of developing a Martian life-finding experiment. He wasn't even first through the gate: some biology professor at the University of Rochester was already cashing NASA checks to help hatch a bug-detector called "Wolf Trap." Perhaps that guy's first-over-the-moat stature had made the process easier for all who followed.
By this time, Gilbert Levin had amicably divorced himself from public health employment and instead cofounded a small environmental consulting firm in Washington DC. The offices of Resources Research lay within a rectangular brick two-story on northwest Taylor Street, just upstairs from a plumbing company. Four small offices complemented a quadruplet of long lab benches. "The space had recently been renovated, featuring grass wallpaper and built-in lobby furniture," according to Levin. He certainly wasn't able to devote himself full time to the NASA gig — it took up maybe 15 percent of any typical workweek — but had received enough funding to employ a couple of full-time assistants. They cataloged any design or procedural enhancements as memoed by Levin, typed everything up, and generally tried to keep pace with his effervescent imagination and new ideas that came in spontaneous, fully automatic bursts.
"There were no real deliverables," explained Levin of the arrangement. "It was just scientific research, and support of space biology research by NASA, with the ultimate intention of looking for life on Mars. So all I produced were reports!"
Every potential variable got attention: wet soils, dry soils, frozen soils. Frozen and dry. Pure germ cultures, mixed cultures, dormant cultures. They wanted simply to try everything. "We didn't know what the heck might be on Mars," he reminded of the time period. "If anything."
One issue that quickly sprang to mind was this: what happens if the thing lands on Mars, spritzes nutrient on a dirt sample, and radioactive carbon dioxide is given off — but it's really because of a chemical reaction? How would they know? "We could be fooled by it," Levin remarked — heightening the danger of blind trust in his own creation.
"But you know," he continued, "every experiment isn't a true experiment unless there's a control to demonstrate that you really had achieved what you thought." In this case, Gil Levin's team required a way to distinguish between a chemical process and one that was biological. On the surface that seemed pretty easy: chemicals react, right? But they don't live, so what if the Grim Reaper somehow paid a visit? What if they tested once, normally, then killed off any possible bacteria in the testing chamber and ran a second trial? It'd have to be done precisely, without disrupting basic chemical reactions. But the concept made good sense and topped their list of must-haves.
Tests continued, one round after another, while Levin struggled to flesh out every last aspect of how his final machine might realistically operate on the surface of a foreign world. Real operations got them all thinking hard. And that's when the group confessed to a fundamental flaw: without exception, every trial had begun with dirt already in the testing chamber.
Well, wait a second. How's it going to get there in the first place?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Infinity Beckoned by Jay Gallentine. Copyright © 2016 Jay Gallentine. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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