It Came From Outer Space

Scientists who boldly predicted discovering alien life ended up a stone's throw from controversy.

Reviewed by Charles Seife

Sunday, February 26, 2006; BW04

THE ROCK FROM MARS

A Detective Story On Two Planets

By Kathy Sawyer

Random House. 394 pp. $25.95

On Aug. 7, 1996, the war of the worlds began in earnest. At a press conference in NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters, researchers announced that a craggy lump of rock teemed with evidence of ancient Martian life. If true, E.T. had been found.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/23/AR2006022301678.html

To quote:

Sawyer tells the story well, though her sympathetic portraits of NASA scientists and managers rely heavily on their points of view. This causes some problems with balance. From NASA's perspective, criticism of its work might well seem to be "belligerencies" or attacks laced with "sheer personal vitriol," as Sawyer describes them, but to scientists on the other side of the issue, their comments were justified scientific criticism of a high-profile study. Sawyer's prose tends to bolster one side and undermine the other, occasionally even bordering on ad hominem. For example, anti-Mars-life scientists are painted as needlessly pugnacious: one "antagonist" is "fonder of confrontation than most" while another "did not suffer criticism lightly."

It's excusable for a journalist to pick sides in a fight she's studied for so long. Less acceptable, though, is that Sawyer occasionally uses rhetoric to obscure opposing arguments rather than to elucidate them. In the 1990s, she writes, NASA began to present its best science results with "a series of news updates that included video and graphics, dissenting points of view, context, and a tilt toward English over jargon. The perceived success of this approach in attracting media coverage fed a current of indignation among those who considered such efforts unseemly."

This is unfair. Clarity and evenhandedness didn't infuriate NASA critics. The nay-sayers were angry because they thought that NASA's PR machine tended to hype scientific findings beyond reason when political stakes were high -- or, worse yet, that NASA tarted up subpar research and presented it to the public as first-rate science in order to justify otherwise unjustifiable spending. John Glenn's shuttle flight and the "world-class" laboratory work of the International Space Station are arguably prime examples. To some, so is the Mars meteorite.