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The NRC reports do mention Levin's opinions if not his specific papers. They don't even dismiss them out of hand despite a scientific consensus which is against them. BD's comments paint the false picture that the NRC has not bothered to review Levin's work. If you disagree with the implication that BD is being intentionally misleading, please indicate why you think he frequently makes such comments.
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You won't get any sympathy from me here. I'm still smarting from the fact that articles published in the Proceedings of the NAS that confirmed points that Levin has been making about the Viking GCMS and about the possibility of liquid water on Mars and which I'm fairly sure were inspired by Levin's expressed opinions on these issues did not cite Levin's prior work.
One could argue in regard to the NRC reports on MSR that by not providing the references to Levin's work the reader could not form his own assessment of the validity of Levin's arguments.

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Further misrepresentation of the issue results from DiGregorio's repeated failure to mention the evidence that Martian organisms should be able to survive transport to Earth via some Martian meteorites and that Martian meteorites routinely fall to Earth uncontained. Why is it he omits this in all his opeds? This is far more misleading than failure to explicitly site poorly regarded journal articles.
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I don't know if he omits this in all his opinion pieces on the issue. I gather he has the opinion that the transmission of organisms from Mars to Earth is unproven. My opinion is if there is life on Mars such transmission almost certainly has occurred. However, it is impossible to know how often such transmissions have occurred and the possible effects they have had on life on Earth.

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Until BD can honestly face up to this evidence, I will consider him nothing but an intellectual fraud.
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Every one is allowed their opinion. I don't consider Barry a fraud. In particular in reading his book I was impressed by the amount of reading he did of the original scientific articles about Mars and exotic biology.

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His continued siting of Hoyle's decades old rejected flu from space theories while rejecting the idea that protected organisms can be transported from Mars indicate either intellectual fraud or an inability to realize even straight forward implications of theories he supposedly supports.
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This really seems to me to be a weak argument here. There are many theories for the origin of life floating around even decades older than Hoyle's theory and they are ALL still unproven. And this includes theories that get the most support from biologists, such as for example the RNA world hypothesis.
One could argue that as time goes on more evidence acrues to support Hoyle's theory such as the ubiquity of organic compounds throughout the universe, and the complexity of the organics that have been found to be contained within comets.
However, one should also note that recently there have been some important new advances to support the RNA world theory as well.

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He also seems either unable to comprehend or to admit that the lack of evidence for Martian microbe transport to Earth is more indicative that life does not exist there than that it can't be transported here. Either dishonesty or intellectual ineptitude makes him unqualified to be the judge of good MSR science he tries to promote himself as.

Regards,
Mark
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Let me rephrase this in a manner that I can agree with:

If it were PROVEN that NO life ever was transmitted to Earth from Mars, then I would say this is strong evidence of no life there. However, I can't imagine how you could prove that.
This is saying something a little different than that the evidence is not available to definitively prove that life WAS transmitted. There could be lots of reasons why that is. It might simply be that we haven't collected enough Mars meteorites and in pristine condition.
Now perhaps you are expressing the opinion that Barry believes that life WAS NOT transmitted from Mars to Earth. But I don't know that's his position. I gather he believes it unlikely, but that even if it did that doesn't prove such transmissions could not be or have not been dangerous.

Bob Clark