Spring 2012 - University of Buckingham

‘We are all aliens’Justine Kibler meets a scientist who believesthat life originated in outer spaceAs a child in 1950s Sri Lanka, ChandraWickramasinghe used to gaze in wonder atthe night sky. Living in a small suburb ofColombo with no light pollution, millions ofstars of the Milky Way would shine abovehim each night, and he vowed to find outwhat they were.In the decades to come,Wickramasinghe, together with thepre-eminent astronomer of the 20thcentury Sir Fred Hoyle, developed severaltheories to understand the universe. Theysuggested that life did not originate onearth, but was instead carried across theuniverse by comets. These theories wereinitially dismissed by scientists as being tooradical. Now, however, after gatheringdefinitive evidence, they are findingacceptance, and the University ofBuckingham is on the frontline of thissuccess.The Buckingham Centre for Astrobiologyis a unique research centre. Headed byProfessor Wickramasinghe, it continues theresearch that he and Fred Hoyle embarkedupon in the 1960s.It unifies ideas from bothbiology and astronomy with the aim ofunravelling one of life’s greatest mysteries:where are we from?Born in Sri Lanka, Wickramasinghewas the son of Percival HerbertWickramasinghe, a senior scholar ofmathematics at the University ofCambridge. He studied mathematics at theUniversity of Ceylon, and received the topgrade in his degree. In recognition he wasawarded a scholarship to study for a PhD atCambridge University. Sir Fred Hoyle choseWickramasinghe as his student, and thetwo eventually became colleagues andfriends.Wickramasinghe’s research at Cambridgebegan with some very modest ideas. He setout to understand what cosmic dust wasmade of. Cosmic dust is composed ofmicroscopic particles of material and isfound in space between the planets andstars. Up to the 1960s astronomers believedthat it was made up of tiny ice particlessimilar to those found in the Earth’s clouds,but Wickramasinghe soon found that theywere actually made mostly of carbon.“These findings were extremelycontroversial at the time because peopledidn’t want to change their thinking, butpowerful evidence came along which meantthat they had to reject these former ideas,”he says.Using new results from astronomy andChandra Wickramasinghe thinks that life was carried across the universe by cometscalculations, Wickramasinghe soondiscovered that this carbonaceous materialhad to be of an organic character. Then,given that a third of all the carbon in thespace between the stars was made up ofthis complex life-like dust, he began toquestion why there was so much of thismaterial in the galaxy.“We next turned our attention to ourplanet. Ninety nine point nine per cent ofthe organic material on earth is madethrough biology. It is the most importantway – and the only way we know for sure –that organic molecules are made inquantity. And so the question began todawn on us – what if all of this matter inspace is actually being generated by lifeprocesses as well? Why do we have onemodel for the earth and reject it for the restof the universe? So we began to explore thehypothesis that cosmic dust might bebiological material or at least biologicallygenerated. That was the beginning of ideasof life being widespread in the universe;a process that started way out in spacerather than here on the earth.”The 1980s saw some breakthroughevidence to back up this theory. Hans Pflug,a German geologist and paleontologist,found fossilised bacteria in a meteorite.This provided evidence that life existedoutside of the earth and was being carriedaround the universe in comets andmeteorites. In 1982 Hoyle andWickramasinghe concluded that theconnection between biology and astronomywas so strong that there should be nodistinction between them; their boundariesIf a really big newtheory threatensa well-establishedparadigm such as theorigin of life, therewill often be a greathesitation to leap oversuch a gulf in thinkingwere artificial and man-made. Fromtheir conclusion the new discipline ofastrobiology arose, of which theBuckingham Centre for Astrobiologyis a descendant.Both the theory that life has beendistributed by comets and the newdiscipline of astrobiology have been slowto gain acceptance in the science world.“The majority of astronomers still find itvery uncomfortable to get to grips withthese ideas,” says Wickramasinghe.He believes that this reluctance reflectshuman nature in general. “I think humanbeings are innately conservative. We don’tlike to move house, we don’t like to changeour relationships with other people, andI think emotional stability is probably theexplanation for scientific conservatismas well. If a really big new theory threatensa well-established paradigm such as theorigin of life, there will often be a greathesitation to leap over such a gulf inthinking. For example it took nearly 300years, from the time of Galileo to Newton,for the old order of an Earth-centredcosmos to be rejected. It shouldn’t be thatway if science is to be entirely objective– change should be dictated by facts.Things move faster now because the paceof scientific activity has sped up a lot, butthe basic resistance to change is still there– it’s part and parcel of humanpsychology.”Evidence supporting the theory ofpanspermia is now mounting, however, andWickramasinghe’s once radical ideas arebecoming increasingly recognised. Inrecent years NASA astronomer RichardHoover also found evidence of fossilisedorganic material in meteorites, and otherresearchers such as Sun Kwok from theUniversity of Hong Kong have also begun todraw similar conclusions about the life-likenature of cosmic dust.“Life is a truly cosmic phenomenon.People, and particularly astronomers, havebeen shying away from this conclusion, butit’s inevitable that their views will change,”says Wickramasinghe. “There’s no way inwhich life could have originated on earthas it is far too small a setting to make thattransformation from non-life to life. So weare all aliens, in a sense. We are all part ofa connected chain of being that extendsacross the whole universe. Our biospheredoesn’t end on the surface of our earth –it extends to almost infinity.”Wickramasinghe believes the research atThe CVAge 73Education BSc in Mathematics at theUniversity of Ceylon, PhD in Mathematicsat Cambridge University, ScD by theUniversity of CambridgeCareer Fellow of Jesus College andDirector of Studies in Mathematics,Cambridge 1962–75, founder ofAstrophysics Department in Cardiff 1975,founder of Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology2000, Director of Buckingham Centre forAstrobiology 2011 to presentHobbies Poet and authorthe new Centre will take all these ideasto their logical conclusion. “We areapproaching a point that is very criticalin the whole story of astrobiology, and it’sturning out that Buckingham will discoverthe definitive evidence, and win credit forperhaps the most important scientificrevolution of our time.”He also believes that Buckingham isthe ideal place for the new science ofAstrobiology, as conceived by him andHoyle, to reside. “As an independentUniversity it is not riddled with old ideasand prejudices, and it deserves to be inthe frontline of an important developmentlike this.”Despite the criticism he has faced overthe years, and the many questions that stillremain unanswered, Wickramasinghe looksback fondly on his career. “It has been anexciting adventure,” he says, “trying toovercome these various obstacles andtrying to solve the question of how lifebegan on the earth and how life beginsanywhere in the universe. I think I wasdriven only by a desire to know what is true– sometimes at the expense of ostracismand hostility. But in perspective all thatdoes not seem to matter so much to me.I have to admit that my research has notbrought us anywhere nearer to solving theproblem of how life began in the universe inthe first place. That’s something that is stilla very distant dream for the future – maybewe’ll never know how the first life emergedfrom non-life. What I can say with absoluteconfidence is that once life got started inthe universe as a unique event, then itsspread is inevitable, and it’s unstoppable.We humans on this planet are part of thiscosmic process.”10 The Independent The Independent 11