Don says: "Barry, what will you say and do if Beagle 2 comes up empty-handed? Are you fully prepared for possible bad news? For my money, I hope they find something that points to life. But that alone, would not resuscitate Gil Levin."

Barry's reply:

Regarding Levin's LR experiment Dr. Harold Klein in a 1978 issue ICARUS, said: “If information from the other experiments [GEX and GCMS]…had not been available, this set of data would almost certainly been interpreted as presumptive evidence for biology.”

Beagle 2 does not carry a life-detection instrument per se, but will likely refute the Viking GCMS findings. As Dr. David McKay and David Warmflash point out in their 2002 LPI abstract which shows Martian meteorites contain indigenous Martian organic matter:

"Given this perspective on organic material, a biological interpretation to the Viking LR results can no longer be ruled out. In the LR experiment, a solution containing 14C labeled organic compounds was injected into soil samples. The detection of radioactivity in the overhead space would indicate that one or more of the substrates had been chemically converted into a carbon containing gas. To serve as a control, some samples were heated enough to destroy most known terrestrial microbes so that an indication for life would be a positive response from unheated samples and a negative response from heated samples [13]. On Mars, the LR results had met minimum criteria for a biological interpretation [2] but due to the GC-MS results, the LR responses were later attributed to putative soil inorganic oxidants [3]. Since the time of Viking, studies have been carried out with the objective of determining an oxidant or combination of oxidants that might exist on Mars and have produced the observed kinetics of the LR response. To date, no such agent has been found that produces all aspects of the LR results on Mars. Therefore, in light of the SNC meteorites data and their implications for the possibility of organic matter near or on the Martian surface, it is concluded that inorganic and biological explanations for the Viking LR data should now be considered equally plausible until more complete studies of the Martian surface are carried out."

So Don, given the above on how McKay and Warmflash view the LR, are you still convinced it did not find evidence for life? Or are you of the opinion that McKay and his graduate student are "has been" scientists like you refer to Dr. Levin and Colin Pillinger?

Barry D.