Dr. Chandra Wickramsinghe
Dr. Wickramasinghe is considered a leading expert on interstellar material and the origins of life. We recently noted his work in the post:
The Red Rain of Kerala - Are Extraterrestrials Among Us?
Our readers are interested in hearing more about the study of astrobiology and the theory of Panspermia. We are pleased to post an interview with Dr. Wickramasinghe where he speaks about his career and involvement in the study of the Red Rain of Kerala phenomenon.
We understand that you were born in Sri Lanka, do you feel growing up in Sri Lanka in the 40’s and 50’s influenced the professional path you followed? Would you share some of your earlier experiences that inspired you to pursue math and science?
My interest in Math and Science and particularly astronomy started very early. I was fortunate in having my father, himself a mathematician, as a mentor in my early teens when I began to take a serious interest in Astronomy. My father had himself been a student at Cambridge and obtained the highest honours as a mathematician. He began working with the great English astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. For family reasons (this was in the 1930’s) he did not continue as a research scientist, but returned to Sri Lanka (Ceylon in his time) to pursue a career in the administrative service. But he maintained his passion for astronomy, and there were lots of classic books in astronomy in the home where I grew up – that was a good start.
I was also enthralled by the splendor of the night skies just outside Colombo where I lived. There was no light pollution in those days. The sun sets at 6pm every day, twilight is brief, and the stars and the Milky Way rises in the sky. On a moonless night that was a spectacle to behold. I remember one evening stepping out, gazing at the myriad of stars and wondering what they were. I remember saying to myself on many occasions that some day, I will try to find out what they are.
Another influence in my early life was Buddhism. Buddhist temples are everywhere in the island, and the influence of Buddhism is hard to escape. I read a lot about science in my early teens and I absorbed a lot of Buddhist philosophy too. Buddhism – not a religion really, more a philosophy – exhorts people to find out things for themselves. It leaves unanswered the questions that other religions answer with confidence – whether or not there is a god, was the universe created or was it always there, and so on. I was impressed by certain Buddhist writings which described the Universe in distinctly post-Copernican terms. The existence of planets going round the sun, of galaxies and so on. These writings go back a couple of thousand years, when the Earth centered Universe was the accepted dogma of the West. All this played some part in my thinking and my scientific development in later years.
You attended Cambridge to work on your PhD under the supervision of Sir Fred Hoyle. That must have been an incredible experience. How did your time and study at Cambridge shape your subsequent work in the study of interstellar dust and the possibility of organic matter in space?
Dr. Fred Hoyle
I finished my undergraduate studies in Math in the University of Ceylon and won a scholarship to enter the University of Cambridge as a PhD student. I had applied to study astronomy for my PhD but I had no knowledge who would supervise me. Two months before I sailed to England I remember opening a blue airmail envelope with my name and address written in a neat hand, posted from Cambridge. I was overjoyed to read its content. A letter from no other than the legendary Sir Fred Hoyle inviting me to be his research student. I was overjoyed. I had read Fred Hoyle’s “Frontiers of Astronomy” earlier that year, and recall being tremendously influenced by it. And this was one of the reasons I asked to do astronomy for my PhD. I arrived in Cambridge in September 1960 and remember vividly my excitement at seeing Fred Hoyle for the first time. He was a quiet man, deeply absorbed in his work, and my first meeting at his residence, was brief. I was given a reading list and I went away to try to learn more of the seminal work on the origin of the chemical elements in stars which Fred had completed 5 years earlier, in a series of scientific papers that changed astronomy for ever. Fred and his colleagues taught the world how all the chemical elements of which we are made and of which every thing in the world is made came to be. They were synthesized from H and He in the deep interiors of stars, and expelled into space with the explosion of supernovae.
So the life elements came from stars. But how did the life elements (C, N, O, P…) get transformed into living things? This is the problem I immediately began thinking of when I next went to see Fred Hoyle. Fred Hoyle told me that this was not a problem for a PhD, I should think of something perhaps more tractable. There are huge quantities of dust in interstellar space, dust clouds that show up as gigantic dark obscuring clouds against the Milky Way – the Milky Way that I became interested in from early childhood. How is this dust formed from the chemical elements (the atoms) that are expelled from supernovae?
This turned out to be my PhD dissertation. In 1960 astronomers had convinced themselves that the interstellar dust was nothing more that sub-micron sized ice particles, similar to the ice particles that exist in the cumulous clouds of the Earth's upper atmosphere. My research showed that the existing model was wrong. The particles in interstellar space were made largely of the chemical element carbon. At the time I wrote my PhD thesis I argued the case for saying that the carbon was in the form of soot-like graphitic particles. The thesis was highly commended. I was awarded a Fellowship at Jesus College Cambridge, which meant that I could continue to my work in Cambridge. I worked very closely with Fred Hoyle from this time 1973 to the time of his death in 2001.
Soon we found that the graphite particle idea had to be refined. In 1974 we published a paper in Nature arguing for the carbon in interstellar dust to be in the form of organic polymers. This was the result of new astronomical observations and more theoretical work.
In 1974 you published your first work about the organic nature of space. Was the paper positively reviewed by your peers at the onset, or did you it find a cold reception from the scientific community?
The first paper was entitled “Formaldehyde Polymers in Interstellar Space”. This was stringently but fairly reviewed and published. Astronomers felt they had taken enough disappointments in rejecting the importance of ice grains in space, and replacing them with carbonaceous particles. Yes, we had some critics of the organic polymer theory, but they eventually accommodated this idea. The time when we faced severe criticism was when we decided that the polymers in space must have a relevance to life. We argued that there was a need to convert 30% of all the carbon in space into organic polymers, and the most efficient way to do this was to bring in biology. We first suggested that prebiotic chemistry was taking place in space. And that the prebiotic molecules were carried in comets and delivered to planets like Earth, where life then starts. This was intensely controversial when first suggested by us, but now everyone accepts it. This was indeed the idea in our book “Lifecloud” written in 1976. But we kept on wondering how so much organic material could be made by non biological processes in interstellar clouds.
Galactic Center - Photo by Don Dixon
The fact is that almost all the organic matter on Earth is derived from biology, and biology is by far the most efficient way to convert inorganic matter to organics. So we asked ourselves in 1979: “Could it be that the organics we see so abundantly strewn in space is also derived from biology, biology operating on a cosmic scale? Why not? When we came to think about it there was no reason at all to exclude this possibility. So we asked what if all this organic stuff in space is generated biologically? Our first prediction was that the infrared spectra of very distant cool stars should show absorption spectra resembling the spectra of freeze-dried bacteria. The first observations came in 1980 of a source near the galactic centre called GCIRS7, and lo and behold the spectral agreement with bacteria was perfect.
What other discoveries were taking place as you were developing the Panspermia theory? How did this other work support your findings?
Interstellar Dust Cloud
From the 1980’s onwards astronomical observations, using new telescopes, new techniques were coming in thick and fast. And all the predictions of panspermia and the theory of biological dust in space have been verified. In 1984 the German Paleontologist Hans D. Pflug discovered stunning evidence for very specific types of microbes existing in fossilized form in meteorites. There had been similar claims 20 years before that were dismissed on the grounds of contamination, but Hoyle and I studied Pflug’s images carefully and we were convinced that these were the relics of microbial life in a carbonaceous meteorite, a meteorite that was generally accepted to be a spent comet. So the idea that comets carry microbial life began to gain ground in our thinking at least.
There were also new geological data that indicated that the early atmosphere of the Earth was of a kind (oxidizing atmosphere, rather than a reducing atmosphere) and it was generally agreed that organic molecules and the “primordial soup” cannot form under these conditions.
Comet
Then in 1986 when comet Halley was approaching perihelion, Hoyle and I made the prediction that the spacecraft studies would discover the comet to be made of dark organic material. When everyone was looking for a dirty snowball comet, we were predicting an organic comet with a dark (burnt) crust in the exterior. We were proved right and everyone else wrong. Since 1986 comets have been all found to be dark and organic, and almost certainly harbouring microbial life.
Astronomy also has progressed in supplying more and more data pointing to cosmic life. The well known PAH’s signatures in the Universe are all rationally explained on the base of biopolymers – the break-up products of living cells. And this evidence now extends to very distant dust clouds, when the universe was less than a quarter of its present radius.
Possible Sign of Life on Meteor
Apart from all this astronomical data microbiologists were discovering amazing properties of extremophiles – bacteria that can survive under the harshest of space conditions. And Earth scientists were finding evidence for the first life on Earth between 3.85 and 4 billion years ago when the Earth was known to have been bombarded by comets. So comets may not only have brought much of the Earth’s oceans, they may also have brought life.
The possible signs of life found on the Martian meteorite ALH84001 must have been an encouraging discovery. Do you feel we will find definitive proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms during our life time?
Yes, unquestionably so. The Viking Mars experiments of 1976 are still not fully explained on the basis of “no active biology”, I think the evidence for microbial life just below the surface of Mars in many places, and certainly under the polar icecaps is very strong. Well within a decade this will be accepted as unquestionable.
When did you first become involved in the Red Rain study?
Red Rain Cells
In 2002 Godfrey Louis sent me a sample of the red rain, and a copy of his paper on this subject and asked if I could arrange for confirmatory work on his result – he found evidence for a red pigmented microorganism that could multiply at 300C under high pressure. We made a number of investigations of this rain using electron microscopy, fluorescence microscopy and visual microscopy, and agreed that the red rain particles were an unusual type of biological cell. Recently my student was able to grow the cells at a temperature of 121C under pressure, making them the most thermophilic of organism known. Godfrey Louis has reported that there is no DNA in these cells, which if true, would make them truly alien compared to all other life that depends on DNA for holding genetic patterns. We are still not able to independently verify this claim. The cell walls of the organisms are so thick that extraction of DNA is difficult.
What do you make of the cells’ unusual growth characteristic?
I think these cells do have properties that are not shared by other microbial cells on Earth. That does not necessarily make this alien, but there are indications that this may be so.
Can you help us understand the significance of the fluorescence qualities of the cells? And how this may tie these cells to an extraterrestrial origin?
Most biomolecules fluoresce, but it appears that the fluorescence behavior of the red rain cells is different. Fluorescence wavelengths are normally related to the excitation wavelength, but this is not so in the case of the red rain cells.
