Hi NIck -

The way it happened was much different than you've been led to believe...

I was up at the annual NAS Mars meeting, chatting with Dr. McKay by the buffet. He mentioned the Mars meteroites and I immediately asked if they had been looking for fossils. McKay mentioned the hydrocarbons, and Leonard David had overheard this and asked me if he could have this one. I said sure, but then Leonard made the mistake of leading Dr. McKay away, and thus he missed the followup, which was were the hydrocarbons structured.

Since he missed the followup, Leonard only got a one paragraph in Spacenews, but it was enough to force McKay to publish. People were calling, and Goldin was hot to get the story out (he's a Mars fan, remember?), he called McKay in and asked him if he had enough to go public. He did: the hydrocarbon compounds are predominantly if not only found within the cell walls. And I interviewed the guy from Berkely that did the laser scans on this, before the news conference, but that's another story...

A lot of folks have raised a lot of objections since then, but unless the hydrocarbon compound distribution has been found to be different than the first laser scans showed, I don't think theses people have proved their case...

President Clinton was a passenger on this one...

best wishes -
ed