How bugs hitch-hike
across the galaxy 

Mankind’s search for alien life could be jeopardized by ultra-resilient bacteria from Earth, David Derbyshire reports

What was the most important discovery of the Apollo program? Some have argued that it was the rocks that explained how the Moon was formed. Others believe it was the technological spin-offs. But according to Captain Peter Conrad, who led the 1969 Apollo 12 mission, it was life.

On the apparently dead lunar surface, a colony of bacteria was thriving. The organisms were not native to the Moon but were visitors from Earth who had hitch-hiked a ride onboard one of Nasa’s five Surveyor probes from the 1960s. To the astonishment of biologists, between 50 and 100 Streptococcus bacteria survived the journey across space, at an average temperature 20 degrees above absolute zero with no source of energy or water, and stayed alive on the Moon in a camera for three years. Captain Conrad, who returned the bacteria to Earth, was later to confess: ‘I always thought the most significant thing we ever found on the whole Moon was the little bacteria that came back and lived.'

The ability of life to survive, adapt, and evolve never fails to astonish. Over the past three decades, bacteria and archaea have been found in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Known as extremophiles, these organisms have coped with life in a vacuum, pressure as high as 70 tons per square inch, depths of four miles beneath the surface, and scorching waters around deep-sea volcanic vents. They have also survived 25 million years inside a bee preserved in resin. Their resilience has renewed enthusiasm for the search for alien life – a quest that many had assumed had been banished to fantasy fiction. Mars and the moons Titan, Europa, and Calisto are once again plausible candidates for extraterrestrials.

As interest in alien life has grown, so have concerns that mankind could spread its own microscopic bugs, contaminating the places we want to explore. In 2003, Nasa ended the Galileo probe’s mission by smashing it into Jupiter. The fear was that it could be carrying bacteria that might contaminate Europa’s oceans.

The team behind Beagle 2 — the British probe that went to search for life on Mars in 2003 – was forced to take contamination particularly seriously. If Beagle carried to Mars life or dead spores picked up during the manufacture of the spacecraft, its science would be jeopardized. Prof Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist who headed the Beagle project, said: ‘What we’ve learned since the Apollo missions and the Viking Mars missions of the 1970s is that bugs are far more tenacious than we ever imagined. They seem to be very tolerant of high temperatures, they lie dormant at low temperatures for long periods, they are immune to salt, acid, and alkali, they seem to survive on the substrate and are not what people expect. Extremophiles are extremely adapted to hanging on to life.’

Beagle had to be assembled in a ‘clean room’ – and one was specially put together in a converted BBC outside broadcast van garage in Milton Keynes. It had enough room to include an enormous set of fans that circulated and filtered the air 500 times an hour. Only a handful of trained researchers were allowed inside. ‘I wasn’t allowed in,’ says Prof Pillinger. ‘There was special training for people going in there and special conditions. There was a ban on beards and a limit of four people at any one time. The team kept samples of everything that could have contaminated the craft and monitored every stage of assembly.’

To reduce the workload, the idea was to build as much as possible before sterilizing it and banishing it to the difficult working conditions inside the cleanroom. The easy stuff was heated to 115C for 52 hours, more than enough to kill off bugs. Electronic equipment can’t cope with those sorts of temperatures, so the team used a hydrogen peroxide plasma, created in a microwave, to kill off bugs at low temperatures. Parachutes and gas bags were zapped with gamma radiation. It wasn’t just facial hair that was banned. ‘You’ve heard of the paperless office,’ says Prof Pillinger. ‘We had the paperless assembly line. The guys normally go in armed with loads of papers and diagrams, but we didn’t allow any of that. They were given information through a glass wall, over mikes and monitors. And sometimes, on a piece of paper stuck to the glass with sticky tape.’

G. Beagle’s heat shield doubled as its biological shield. So once the instruments were encased and sealed, the craft could be brought back into the real world. The shield heated up to 1,700 degrees on its descent through the Martian atmosphere, so bugs on the casing were not a worry. Mars Express – the craft carrying Beagle – did not need sterilizing. Its trajectory was designed so that if something went wrong, the craft would not simply crash into the planet. Its course could be corrected en route.

H. Eventually, space scientists hope to return samples of Mars to Earth. While the risks of alien bacteria proving hazardous on Earth may be remote, the rocks will still need to be quarantined. Moon rocks from Apollo were analyzed in vacuum glove boxes for the first two missions. Later, researchers stored rocks in nitrogen. Prof Pillinger believed the first Mars rocks should be sterilized before they are studied on Earth. ‘For security purposes, it would be the most sensible thing to do. You don’t have to sterilize it all, you can contain some of it and then sterilize the sample you want to look at, but it would lower the risk and make it easier to analyze.’

Finding out about the world
from television news

In The Ideological Octopus (1991), Justin Lewis points to an important issue concerning the formal structure of television news. As he notes, television news lacks the narrative element which, in other genres, serves to capture viewer interest and thus motivate viewing. Lewis posts this as one of the key reasons why television news often fails to interest people and why, when they do watch it. People often cannot understand it. Lewis argues that one fundamental problem with watching television news is that its narrative structure means that the viewer is offered the punchline before the joke – because the main point (the headline) comes right at the beginning, after which the programme, by definition, deals with less and less important things. Thus, in television news our interest is not awakened by an enigma which is then gradually solved, to provide a gratifying solution – as so often happens in fictional narratives. In Lewis’s terms, in television news, there is no enigma, the solution of which will motivate the viewing process. As he baldly states, ‘If we decided to try to design a television programme with a structure that would completely fail to capture an audience’s interest, we might (finally) come up with the format of the average television news show’ (Lewis 1991).

B. What Lewis also does is offer an interesting contrast, in this respect, between the high-status phenomenon of television news and the low-status genre of soap opera. The latter, he observes, offers the most highly developed use of effective narrative codes. To that extern soap opera, with its multiple narratives, could be seen, in formal terms, as the most effective type of television for the cultivation of viewer interest, and certainly as a far more effective form than that of television news for this purpose. Clearly, some of Lewis’s speculation here is problematic. There are counter­ examples of his arguments (e.g. instances of programmes such as sports news which share the problematic formal features he points to but which are nonetheless popular – at least among certain types of viewers). Moreover, he may perhaps overstress the importance of structure as against content relevance in providing the basis for programme appeal. Nonetheless, I would suggest that his argument, in this respect, is of considerable interest.

Lewis argues not only that soap opera is more narratively interesting than television news, in formal terms, but, moreover, that the world of television fiction, in general, is much closer to most people’s lives than that presented in the news. This, he claims, is because the world of television fiction often feels to people like their own lives. They can, for example, readily identify with the moral issues and personal dilemmas faced by the characters in a favourite soap opera. Conversely, the world of television news is much more remote in all senses; it is a socially distant world populated by another race of special or ‘elite’ persons, the world of them not. This is also why ‘most people feel more able to evaluate TV fiction than TV news … because it seems closer to their own lives and to the world they live in the world of television news might almost be beamed in from another planet (Lewis 1991). It is as if the distant world of ‘the news’ is so disconnected from popular experience that it is beyond critical judgment for many viewers. Hence, however, alienated they feel from it, they nonetheless lack any alternative perspective on the events it portrays.

One consequence of this, Lewis argues, is that precisely, because of this distance, people who feel this kind of alienation from the ‘world news’ nonetheless use frameworks to understand news items that come from within the news themselves. This, he argues, is because in the absence of any other source of information or perspective they are forced back on using the media’s own framework. Many viewers are simply unable to place the media’s portrayal of events in any other critical framework (where would they get it from?). To this extent, Lewis argues. Gerbner and his colleagues (see Gerbner et al. 1986; Signorielli and Morgan 1990) may perhaps be right in thinking that the dominant perspectives and ‘associative logics’ offered by the media may often simply be soaked up by audiences of their repetition. This is not to suggest that such viewers necessarily believe, or explicitly accept these perspectives, but simply to note that they have no other place to start from, however cynical they may be, at a general level, about not believing what you see on television, and they may thus tend, in the end, to fall back on ‘what it said on TV’.

 In one sense, this could be said to be the converse of Hall’s negotiated code’ (1980), as taken over from Parkin (1973). Parkin had argued, that many working-class people display a ‘split consciousness’, whereby they accept propositions from the ‘dominant ideology’ at an abstract level, but then ‘negotiate’ or ‘discount’ the application of these ideological propositions to the particular circumstances of their own situation.

Here, by contrast, we confront a situation where people often express, cynicism in general (so that Here, by contrast, we confront a situation where people often express cynicism in general (so that Hot believing what you see in the media’ is no more than common sense), but then in any particular case, they often find themselves pushed back into reliance on the mainstream media’s account of anything beyond the realm of their direct personal experience, simply for lack of any alternative perspective.