Hah, the irony of you mentioning Leeuwenhoeck! Are you trying to suggest you are another Leeuwenhoeck?

Barry wrote: The true trait of an idiot is a person that follows a uninformed stubborn self-nominated commander in his ideas about transfer of Martian microbes without question when NASA's own planetary protection officer blasts him.

Chris writes: Hum, first Zubrin's history before becoming the President of the Mars Society escapes you, possible because you haven't actually ever done any research on him or you aren't a thinking person. Second you didn't actually read the article by Rummel, because he doesn't blast anyone.

From the article ... you abusively reposted at least 13 times since it first came out (anyone here reading from HQ The Planetary Society...does posting something so many times in its whole constitute fair use? I don't think so. Any lawyer want the case against Barry?)

***Would Mars life necessarily be dangerous?

Hardly. If there is life on Mars, it could be related to life on Earth (due to the natural interchange of materials occasioned by large impact events), or it might be completely unrelated to Earth life. Either scenario would argue for simple prudence in returning a sample from Mars. NASA's current policy, as recommended by the US National Research Council, is not extreme. Rather, it is based on the sound principle that a sample from Mars should be contained until scientists find it does not contain a biohazard.

...

Due to space limitations, I won't rebut item by item some of Bob's erroneous talking points. And I will agree with him that it would be a terrible loss to sterilize samples prior to their return-it may be difficult to sterilize such samples in any event. One canard to point out, however, is Bob's assertion that "microorganisms are adapted to specific environments," and thus Mars microbes would refrain from living on Earth. This is not a reliable speculation. A notable counterexample from Earth is Deinococcus radiodurans, an organism first isolated from nuclear power plants-environments that did not exist prior to the 1940s. Where did this microbe come from? Deinococcus radiodurans has since been found in natural environments (dry lakebeds) quite unlike Three-Mile Island. What other Earth organisms do we know nothing about?

A rational program of containment and biohazard testing will not only allow us to determine the safety of a returned Mars sample, but it will also allow us the best chance of detecting Mars life, if it exists, when a sample is brought to Earth. Strident arguments on one side ("Mars samples will kill us all!") or the other ("The threat of back contamination is 'hallucinatory'!") do not add value to the discussion about appropriate and reasonable precautions to take in the conduct of what promises to be a vital and intriguing scientific endeavor. The significance of Mars calls for responsible exploration, and Bob Zubrin should have taken more time to inform himself of the real issues at hand. In fact, the time he took to write the piece could have been spent learning enough to have made his opinion much more valuable. ***

http://www.planetary.org/html/news/opinions/caution.html