Mars rocks

>> Meet McGill professor Hojatollah Vali, one of the world's only astrobiologists

by PHILIP PREVILLE

 McGill University Professor Hojatollah Vali holds in his possession a small chunk of what is probably the most precious rock on earth: Martian meteorite ALH84001, the now-famous space rock found in Antarctica in 1996 that contains evidence of bacterial life on Mars. Thanks to a fellowship grant, Dr. Vali was working for NASA when the rock was found. He became part of the research team that found traces of organic life embedded in it.

 Dr. Vali admits he was lucky. "Everything in life is a coincidence, but especially so when you deal with space research," he says. "These kinds of discoveries are rare, because you're working with a vast expanse and you don't really know what you're looking for until you find it."

 And with that discovery, in the blink of an electron microscope, Dr. Vali suddenly became one of the world's leading experts in an academic discipline which, until that very moment, had never existed: astrobiology, the study of living organisms from outer space.

 To Dr. Vali's credit, McGill is one of only a handful of universities who've been given a piece of the ALH84001 rock. Now, like St. Peter building Christ's church upon that rock in Jerusalem, Vali is trying to build an entire McGill astrobiology program atop those few measly grams chipped off meteorite ALH84001. (In 1997, NASA partnered with 10 American universities to create an American astrobiology program.) On Thursday, March 9, McGill is hosting a full-day astrobiology forum featuring speakers from both NASA and the Canadian Space Agency--all part of Dr. Vali's plan to build McGill's astrobiological reputation.

 "We need to have this kind of expertise in Canada," Dr. Vali insists. "If we develop a program, maybe we won't lose all our best space researchers to the U.S."

 Joyride on a meteor
 The other thing Dr. Vali wants to do with his ALH84001 fragments is prove that life on earth came (or at least could have come) from outer space. While he is not allowed to disclose how big his rocks are, he says he was given a larger piece of the meteor due to the nature of his research proposal: in a nutshell, he thinks he can prove that the inner core of the meteor never rose above 40*C.

 Why should anyone care about the inner temperature of a zillion-year-old meteor? "People assume that it turned into a big fireball and burned up when it entered the atmosphere," he says. "But that's only true of the outer two millimetres, which were basically turned to glass because they reached temperatures in the thousands. But the inside of that rock is another thing altogether." By comparison, 40*C is about the temperature of a Texas heat wave--and at that temperature, Martian bacteria could have hitched a ride to earth and lived to tell about it.

 Dr. Vali says he enjoys The X-Files but is not a regular weekly viewer. He has also seen the movie Stargate and would not speculate on whether the Egyptian pyramids are actually landing pads for alien space ships. "I'm a scientist," he says. "I draw conclusions from the known facts. In the absence of factual information, anything is possible."

 Anything? "If I took an electron-microscope image of a brain cell and a spectroscopic image of our entire universe, and if I put those images side by side, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them," he says. "The coincidences are just too uncanny." :

 McGill's astrobiology forum begins at 7:30pm on Thursday, March 9 at the Palmer Howard Theatre, 3655 Drummond; free. Info: 398-6350