When Imre Friedmann and his wife, Roseli Ocampo-Friedmann, settled down in Tallahassee following years of academic wandering, they fell into a comfortable evening routine. After he returned home from Florida State University and she from Florida A&M;, they kept track of world-shaking events by watching the cbs evening news, usually while eating dinner. This began in the fall of 1968. Day after day, year after year, they watched and they munched. One night in 1978, they heard anchorman Walter Cronkite talking about Mars--out of the blue, the possibility of life on Mars, in the form of algae, or bacteria, that could live inside rocks. Ah! Roseli gasped, her utensils losing their grip on some now- forgotten meal. He’s talking about us!
Two obscure microbiologists who had published a paper about bacteria living in the remotest reaches on Earth--Cronkite was indeed talking about them. The news item, it turned out, was a sequel to a major story of a year and a half earlier. On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 spacecraft had touched down on Mars, and the Friedmanns, along with millions of other Americans, had listened to Cronkite describe the historic landing. Over the next few months the evening news followed the progress of Viking experiments designed to test the Martian soil for signs of life. The probe discovered unexpected compounds, some of which could have been produced by microorganisms. But mission biologists eventually concluded that the soil on Mars was sterile: no life, they said, could survive the combination of ultraviolet solar radiation, extreme dryness, and lethally oxidizing compounds found on the planet’s surface.
Not long after Viking landed on Mars, the Friedmanns published a paper describing microorganisms living in the Ross Desert of Antarctica, in mountain ranges so cold and dry they were thought to be devoid of life. NASA had sent researchers to test soil there, in fact, as a trial run for Viking; they found nothing persuasive. But the Friedmanns did, without leaving Tallahassee. Not in the soil, but in a rock shipped to their lab-- a small but perfect specimen of Beacon sandstone, as Friedmann described it. The rock was colonized by bacteria that led a miserable existence. All through the dark polar winter, they would barely hold on, at 50 below. Not until summer could they thaw, rehydrate, and photosynthesize, and then only when midday temperatures were sufficiently high--and only if, at the same time, water from melted snow still lingered. The Friedmanns called these creatures cryptoendoliths: crypto for hidden, endolith, meaning inside rocks.
The Friedmanns’ article came out on September 24, 1976, in the midst of the Viking season on Mars. At that date, newspapers were still marveling at the marginally positive evidence for life in a scoopful of Martian soil taken aboard the spacecraft, and here were a pair of researchers announcing life discovered on Earth. I am telling you, Friedmann says, it went totally unnoticed.
A year passed, and the excitement about Viking had soared and crashed. And then one day Friedmann got a phone call. NASA and the National Science Foundation wanted to know if they could issue a press release on his work. He wondered what had prompted these agencies to discover cryptoendoliths; by then, both NASA and the nsf had been funding his research for several years. I said, ‘Okay, go ahead,’ Friedmann recalls. We didn’t know what a press release really meant.
