Volume 49, Number 1, Spring 2000

THE BLOW-BY-BLOW STORY OF NASA, AAAS, STANFORD AND THE MARTIAN METEORITE

by Vincent Kiernan

The meteorite was discovered in 1984 in Antarctica by researchers who routinely scour the frozen continent for meteorites. It was the first meteorite to be discovered in Antarctica in 1984, and it was found in a region known as Allan Hills. As a result, the meteorite was given the designation "ALH 84001."

Originally, researchers thought that the meteorite was a piece of an asteroid known as Vesta.

It would be a decade before the meteorite would receive its first, brief attention from the press. That occurred when a researcher challenged the idea that the meteorite was a piece of Vesta. In a paper presented to the 1994 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, David W. Mittlefehldt concluded that the meteorite did not have the same chemical composition as Vesta and instead probably was a piece of Mars. He suggested that it was blasted into space when a meteor or comet collided with the planet and then spent millions of years before encountering Earth and falling onto Antarctica.

ALH84001 was not the first meteorite to be classified as a piece of Mars; in fact, nine other meteorites already had been categorized as Martian. So Mittlefehldt's conclusion drew journalistic attention only from specialized publications.
Soon after, the scientific team that later would receive so much media attention began to assemble. Working with a NASA scientist named Chris Romanek, Mittlefehldt found small blobs of chemicals known as carbonate in the meteorite. The meteorite was four billion years old, but the carbonate was only 3.6 billion years old, so the carbonate must have formed in the rock several hundred years after the rock itself was formed. Romanek brought his mentor, Everett Gibson, into the project. At the same time, another NASA researcher, David McKay, also had started studying the meteorite. Using an electron microscope, he noticed tubular structures in the rock that seemed reminiscent of living organisms. In the summer of 1994, McKay and Gibson decided to join forces under McKay's leadership to investigate whether there might indeed be signs of life in the meteorite.

In late 1994, after conducting some tests, McKay's team contacted an expert on the formation of life, William Schopf, a paleobiologist at UCLA, who later would play a major role in the initial press coverage of the meteorite. Schopf traveled to Houston, examined the meteorite data, and told McKay's team that they had no conclusive proof that life had existed in the meteorite. He told them that they needed to analyze the chemical composition of the structures in the rock to prove that they were produced by living organisms rather than by geological processes. As a result, the researchers added yet another new member to the team: Richard Zare, a chemistry professor at Stanford University and an expert in using laser techniques to analyze trace amounts of materials.

Originally, researchers thought that the meteorite was a piece of an asteroid known as Vesta.

Unlike the other members of McKay's team, Zare was not a NASA employee, a fact that later would shape his role in press coverage of the meteorite. Zare also brought credibility to the team. Not only was he a world-renowned scientist, he also was the chairman of the National Science Board, and member of the editorial board of the journal Science, the most influential scientific journal published in the United States.

Before long, the researchers found exciting new evidence that a biological organism had been present in the rock in the past: Zare's lab found evidence of chemicals known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) inside the rock. PAHs often are produced when living matter decomposes, so their presence inside the rock suggested that something had long ago lived and died in the rock. In March 1995, McKay's team presented a paper at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, in Houston, that reported which ALH84001 contained PAHs.

The press largely ignored this discovery, probably at least in part because the planetary science meeting attracts relatively few science journalists. In addition, NASA did nothing to draw journalists' attention to the paper. One week before the conference, NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the host for the conference, distributed a press release that highlighted several NASA space missions that would be discussed at the upcoming conference. However, the press release made no mention of the paper from McKay's team. It is unclear why NASA officials did not highlight the discovery of PAHs in the meteorite. NASA officials themselves may not have been fully aware of the research by McKay's team. There are indications that McKay and his colleagues may have kept their superiors in the dark about the project because it was not authorized.

For whatever reason, press coverage of the paper at the planetary meeting was muted. Science News, a weekly newsmagazine of science, carried a short story that, instead, emphasized other details of the paper that supported the contention that water had flowed freely on the Martian surface in the past. Sky and Telescope, said that the PAHs could "conceivably" have been produced by chemical reactions similar to those found in living organisms.

The Houston Chronicle, for whom the conference was a local news story, ran an article about the conference presentation on page 34 on a Saturday-three days after the presentation. Even this story played down the possibility of life on Mars. The story's lead paragraph noted that the researchers had found compounds of hydrogen and carbon in the meteorite. The second paragraph then stated: "Although these chemicals are commonly associated on Earth with living things, the team is not claiming to have found life on Mars."

The San Francisco Examiner ran a story headlined "Meteorite may hold secret that there was life on Mars." But the text of the story was more circumspect: "It doesn't mean that there were ever little green men on Mars. But it does strengthen the scientific suspicion that Mars may long ago have been more hospitable to very simple organisms, such as microbes."

This was when journalist Leonard David got his first hint that something more significant was afoot. During a telephone conversation, an official from NASA's Johnson Space Center told David "Something really exciting is happening." David tried to wheedle more information. Was it proof that free water had existed on Mars in the past? "No, much more dramatic," the source said. David then asked if the scientists had found a fossil; the source refused to answer. The conversation convinced David that an important story was waiting to be reported. "I had it in my mind that something exciting about a Mars meteorite had been found. Something inside."

At the time, David was the editor of Final Frontier, a popular magazine for space enthusiasts, in addition to being a correspondent for Space News, a weekly trade newspaper that covers the space industry. In the next issue of Final Frontier, David wrote that the discovery of PAHs in the meteorite "was suggestive that, perhaps, Mars was once a more user-friendly niche for life."

Meanwhile, McKay's team was continuing its study of the Mars meteorite. In early 1996, they found evidence of grains of magnetic minerals in unusual patterns. Similar grains are found in some bacteria, and the researchers believed they were evidence that the blobs in the rock were fossilized bacteria. One member of McKay's team submitted a paper describing the grains for the 1996 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, but she withdrew the paper after the team realized that they might not be able to publish a more comprehensive paper on the discovery later in Science if they disclosed the initial discovery at the planetary science meeting.

McKay's team submitted that paper to Science on April 5, 1996. The editors handled the paper with great secrecy. For example, it was not discussed at routine staff meetings. Over the next three months, the authors made numerous revisions in the paper, based on comments from the journal's peer reviewers.

Meanwhile, David's journalistic curiosity was further piqued in July 1996, when he covered a conference in Boulder, CO, called Case for Mars VI, at which scientists and engineers discussed the prospects for exploration and human settlement of Mars. At the conference, David noted that the meteorite was on many people's lips. Something is coming; there's going to be more of an announcement about this find, David recalled thinking. At Case for Mars, there were a couple of people who brought it up in passing with remarks like: Who knows? Maybe we'll find fossils. A fossil on Mars will be a great story.

Those comments made David realize that the major story of which he had been hearing hints involved a fossil on Mars. "There was definitely something going on now," David says.

He recalls that at the moment that someone made the comment about fossils, he was sitting next to David Chandler, a veteran science reporter for the Boston Globe, who did not appear to take note of the speaker's comments. "He totally zoned out on it," David said. "I thought, My God, you missed that, and I wasn't about to tell him."

On July 16, Science accepted the paper for publication. Then AAAS had to decide in which issue it would appear. Initially, the editors chose the August 16 issue. Briefly, they discussed moving it to the August 9 issue, because artwork for that issue's cover had not yet been chosen and the authors wanted their paper to be the cover story if possible. But the authors were unable to make final revisions to the paper in time for the August 9 issue, so it was rescheduled to August 16.

NASA officials wanted the article published earlier than August 16. One consideration was that the Republican Party's presidential convention in San Diego was scheduled for the week of August 16. Some NASA officials were worried that the Mars announcement might conflict with news coverage of the convention.

Donald M. Savage, a NASA public affairs official, said he worried that the research was so important it would leak before August 16, but Savage denied that political considerations played any role in his desire to publish the paper earlier. Rather, he said it simply represented a routine attempt to avoid scheduling press conferences or major announcements on dates when other major news events are expected. In the end, he said, NASA officials realized that the article would not be ready for the August 9 issue. "We wanted to maintain the credibility of the science process," he said. "We wanted to make sure that we did it the right way.

"Our growing assumption on this was that it was going to be big news," said Savage. "We felt that anything of that magnitude was likely to be, or had the possibility to be, one of the biggest discoveries ever." He felt the discovery should be announced "sooner rather than later." One reason, he said, was that although "a few dozen people" would know about the paper at first, there would be "an exponential growth in terms of the word getting spread around. This story is just so big and so sexy that it was just unavoidable that people were going to be talking about it."

Savage also saw the possibility that an enterprising journalist would uncover the story independently. In that case, he said, NASA was prepared to cancel the embargo and announce the discovery publicly. "We felt that it would be unfair to the taxpayers to let just one major news organization get this story on an exclusive basis."

Yet another subject of dispute between NASA and AAAS was the way the news of the discovery would be distributed. AAAS' usual routine is to provide journalists with embargoed articles from Science one week before the publication date of the issue. Nan Broadbent, the director of communications for AAAS, and Diane Dondershine, an assistant to Broadbent who distributed embargoed materials to journalists every week, wanted to follow the usual procedure. They believed that science journalists would honor the rules despite the sensational findings. But Savage believed that the news would leak during a week-long embargo; NASA wanted Science to omit any mention of the Mars paper in the embargoed materials from the August 16 issue sent to journalists on August 9.

Some NASA officials were worried that the Mars announcement might conflict with news coverage of the (Republican national) convention.

AAAS eventually agreed to this plan. The routine package of embargoed materials for the August 16 issue would not mention the paper by McKay and associates. A second embargoed announcement with news of the Mars paper would be sent to journalists on August 13, three days before the publication date.

AAAS officials also agreed to allow NASA to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. on August 15, the day before the paper's publication date. The press conference would have been embargoed until 4 p.m., which would have meant that live coverage of the press conference would have been forbidden. Generally, the Science embargo lifts at 6 p.m., but the 4 p.m. time was selected in this case for the benefit of journalists in Asia and Australia.

Broadbent said officials at AAAS were looking forward to the meteorite story in part to showcase the abilities of a new Web site for journalists it had developed, named EurekAlert! One section of the site, accessible only to approved reporters with passwords, was used to distribute a lengthy embargoed press release describing the contents of each upcoming issue. AAAS' plan was to post the full text of the meteorite article on the Web site so journalists could download it from the site. In the past, AAAS would have had to fax the article to journalists around the world, incurring high telephone charges. "We were just starting to think about how to upload manuscripts anyway, and so this was a good case study," Broadbent said.

In the weeks after the paper was accepted, public-affairs officials from NASA, AAAS, and Stanford University started preparing press releases, video clips, and other materials for distribution to the press when the finding was announced. There was substantial negotiation among the parties regarding precisely what the releases should say. For example, Salisbury said he drafted a press release that included a lead describing the evidence of nanofossils as "circumstantial." However, a NASA public affairs official wanted a stronger description, so the two compromised on a release that said the study "strongly suggests" the presence of nanofossils in the meteorite.

Schopf, the UCLA paleobiologist who had critiqued the researchers' work two years earlier, was reluctantly recruited to appear at the press conference at which the findings would be announced. After he received a copy of the manuscript, he decided that its claims "seemed overblown, ill-conceived." He then tried to back out of the appearance, but agreed when he was told that Daniel S. Goldin, NASA's administrator, had personally requested him because of his skepticism.

In late June or early July, Broadbent heard a rumor that Goldin had told Vice President Al Gore about the Mars discovery while they traveled together to Russia. She was concerned that that could produce a leak of the story, so she telephoned Rick Borchelt, the public affairs officer for the presidential science adviser. In confidence, Broadbent told Borchelt about the impending paper and asked Borchelt if the rumor was true.

Borchelt asked John Gibbons, the presidential science adviser, whether Goldin had said anything. Gibbons told Borchelt that Goldin had told him that a NASA-funded study soon would "set the world on its ears;" but he said Goldin had not disclosed the substance of the paper. Borchelt also secured a brief meeting with Gore, who told Borchelt that Goldin had said nothing to him about an upcoming paper.

In the following weeks, Borchelt received several inquiries from reporters who had gotten wind of something big impending at NASA. He told the reporters he knew nothing about a major announcement from NASA. In his view, this statement accurate because the announcement was to come from AAAS, not NASA.

This story is just so big and so sexy that it was just unavoidable that people were going to be talking about it.

Meanwhile, in July, Broadbent also secretly provided information on the discovery to astronomer Carl Sagan, who wrote a column for Parade magazine. Broadbent hoped that, with the advance information, Sagan could devote a column to the discovery. Sagan, probably the best-known astronomer of his day, would lend credibility to the discovery, Broadbent said. "If ever we needed someone like Carl Sagan, it was now." But Broadbent had contacted him too late for the column to appear at the time of the scheduled announcement. Nevertheless, as events would later unfold, it proved fortuitous that Sagan had been briefed. When the story leaked, Sagan was one of the few scientists in a position to provide informed comment to journalists.

Broadbent also considered providing the information in advance to the New York Times for coverage in the paper's Sunday magazine. The high-profile coverage would have been welcome, she said. But more importantly, by providing advance information to one department of the newspaper for release at a pre-agreed time, she would have ensured that other Times reporters would not have been able to break the story prematurely. "I thought of all the people who would find out about the story ahead of time. If anybody would, it would have been them." But she decided against that strategy, out of concern that someone at the Times might pass the information to a journalist at another publication. "Everybody goes to cocktail parties." Broadbent was worried that if such a leak occurred, she might be criticized for doing something that she had forbidden the authors of the paper to do; namely talk to the press.

In late July, the news that Science had accepted the meteorite paper made its way up the bureaucratic ladder at NASA to Goldin. A reporter for Texas Monthly magazine concludes that Goldin was pleased with the planned August 16 publication date because of its coincidence with the Republican National Convention. On July 31, McKay and Gibson flew to Washington to meet with NASA's public affairs officials and Goldin. Goldin then briefed Clinton's science adviser, as well as Gore, and eventually Clinton himself.

Goldin told Clinton of NASA's efforts to have the paper published in the August 9 issue of Science rather than the August 16 issue. According to Borchelt, Clinton instructed Goldin to allow the journal to do what its editors thought best. Subsequently, NASA officials dropped their request to accelerate the publishing of the article.

Borchelt found the timing of the presidential briefing to be odd. In his view, there was no need to inform the President of the research at such an early stage. He believes that Goldin may in fact have been trying to precipitate a leak. Indeed, as soon as the briefing concluded, a government official proceeded directly to the White House pressroom and told two reporters-probably from CBS and the Associated Press-about the study, under condition that the information was embargoed.

Meanwhile, Leonard David of Space News was putting more pieces together. In late July 1996, someone from the aerospace industry left a message on his answering machine telling him that there were rumors of a NASA press conference in mid-August. The message didn't say what the press conference would discuss, so David called Savage, the NASA public affairs officer, to find out about the event. Savage was extremely cagey-uncharacteristically so, for an agency that, according to David, is known for its enthusiasm for press coverage. "I thought, well, maybe this is it," David said.

It was Friday, August 2. Space News was preparing its August 5 issue, and David decided to file a news item on the meteorite. "It just glued together in my mind that this is what it was," David said.

"I didn't have anybody say, Here's the thing-the rock's a fossil. It was a lot of little things over, really, a year and a half that seemed to stick in the back of the mind. And all of a sudden this press conference story was coming and, you know, I took a little bit of a gamble." David did ask one "deep-throat person" to read the five-paragraph story. The source told him that it was accurate.

Meanwhile, in July, Broadbent also secretly provided information on the discovery to astronomer Carl Sagan, who wrote a column for Parade magazine.

The story was edited down to three paragraphs and ran on page 2 of the tabloid-format newspaper. Its placement did not draw attention to the article: It was the second of eight news briefs on the page. "The prospect that life once existed on Mars is being raised following analysis of a meteorite recovered on Earth," the item began. It reported that ALH 84001 contained "indications of past biological activity on Mars."

On the same day, presidential adviser Dick Morris bragged about the meteorite discovery to Sherry Rowlands, a prostitute with whom he had a long-running relationship. Rowlands recorded in her diary that Morris boasted that he was one of seven people who knew about the existence of life on another planet. After the news of the discovery subsequently broke, Rowlands would sell her story to the Star, a supermarket tabloid. News that a key presidential adviser had discussed government business with a prostitute would force Morris to resign from his job.

After McKay returned from the White House briefings, he left on a long-scheduled camping vacation on Saturday, August 3. He did not know about the Space News article. Because Science was not scheduled to distribute his paper for two weeks, McKay thought it would be safe for him to be out of town, but as an extra precaution, he brought along a beeper so that NASA could reach him if necessary.

On Monday, August 5, there was no press reaction to the Space News article. But others noticed. Workers at the National Space Society, a pro-space exploration group headquartered in Washington, took immediate note of David's item, said Pat Dasch, editor-in-chief of the group's membership magazine, Ad Astra. "The next thing I knew, our executive editor called a staff meeting and said he was hearing rumors through the mill that this was big, and we should all gear up to be responsive." She checked with sources at NASA and concluded that a major announcement was in the offing. She made plans to revamp the magazine's next edition to include details on whatever was announced.

The next day, she telephoned science journalists to make sure they knew about the Space News item and to alert them about the possibility of a major press conference to discuss the discovery.

Press coverage accelerated rapidly on Tuesday, August 6. The first inquiry at AAAS came about 9:30 a.m. from a White House reporter, who called Dondershine. That was shortly followed by an inquiry from a CBS reporter in Dallas who said that he knew about the discovery but wanted additional details. Broadbent spoke with him and determined that, although the reporter's information had some errors, "for all intents and purposes, he got the story. He had seen the Space News blurb, and said he was running with the story," she explained. "I told him I'd call him back."

Broadbent was faced with a choice: She could refuse to help the reporter, who would then proceed to report the story with some errors, or she could give correct information to the reporter. If she followed the second option, AAAS policy would require Broadbent to make a general announcement of the meteorite paper. "I'm not allowed to knowingly let one reporter go forward with a story and not tell anyone else."

Broadbent tried to convince the reporter to sit on the story, but she also told Monica Bradford, Science's managing editor, that she was going to release the story by disseminating copies of the manuscript and authorizing the paper's authors to talk with the press. Bradford expressed some concern about this plan, wondering whether it was accurate to conclude that the CBS journalist really had enough of the story to justify an early announcement of the paper. She also was concerned that Broadbent's plan required AAAS to distribute a copy of the manuscript with handwritten edits on it since the final, typeset version was not yet available. Bradford was wary because, in an another case in the past, Science had distributed an annotated manuscript and journalists had misquoted from it.

At noon Broadbent called Laurie Boeder, the senior public affairs official at NASA, and told her of her plans to make a general announcement of the Mars paper. "I didn't think we could get CBS to hold," she said. But NASA was strongly opposed to releasing the information. Boeder demanded to speak with the journal's editor-in-chief, and Broadbent decided to back down by agreeing to try to convince CBS to hold the story. "The idea was to buy ourselves one day," by which time the typeset version of the paper would be available. "I said I would wait and distribute the information the next morning," she said. "I made a mistake, and I blinked," she said.

Marcia Dunn, an aerospace reporter for the Associated Press who covers NASA from Cape Canaveral, became aware of the Space News story and notified Paul Recer, an AP science reporter in Washington. Recer wrote a short news story about the discovery, which the AP transmitted at 1:51 p.m. Eastern time. Recer's lead stated: "A meteorite that fell to Earth after possibly being ejected from Mars may bear chemical evidence that life once existed on that planet, NASA officials said Tuesday." The story quoted two NASA spokesmen by name who confirmed the accuracy of the Space News story, but the story did not quote any scientists. The article also quoted an unidentified official at Science as confirming that the paper had been accepted for publication. "I don't know who that is," Broadbent said. "No one talked to me."

Moments later, at 1800 GMT, a science correspondent for the BBC in England announced news of the discovery on the BBCl television channel.

After the AP transmitted its dispatch, CNN jumped on the story. At 2:27 p.m. Eastern time, CNN aired its first report, which appears to be a light rewrite of the Associated Press dispatch. As the afternoon drew on, Broadbent learned from another source that NASA officials had contacted the paper's authors at 7 a.m. that day and instructed them to fly to Washington for a press conference the next day. NASA had not told Broadbent of this, even though that agency needed AAAS' permission to have a press conference with scientists discussing the Science paper before the expiration of Science's embargo. NASA had tried to contact McKay via his beeper, but it malfunctioned. McKay found out that the news had leaked-and that his beeper had malfunctioned-when he happened to call his office on Tuesday.

Broadbent began to suspect that NASA was trying to use the situation to maximize news coverage for itself. NASA officials told her that journalists had told them that they would hold the story. Broadbent decided to call CNN, ABC and other news outlets-and was told that contrary to what NASA was claiming they would not hold the story. She said she was told: Heck no, if we can put it together, we're putting it on.

She said she decided the story was out: It's gone. It's out. There's nothing more you can do. Broadbent also noted that NASA featured prominently in the initial news reports. "People from NASA were quoted everywhere."

Savage, the NASA public affairs officer, said he argued against distributing copies of the paper on Tuesday because the NASA scientists were en route to Washington and thus not available for media interviews. They wouldn't be available till the next day.

Boeder, Savage's boss, echoed that theme. "The essential thing was to allow the scientists to tell their own story. They were the ones who made the discovery," she said.

Broadbent decided to release the story, and notified NASA. "They were not happy," Broadbent said, to the extent that Goldin called Science's publisher and sought to change the decision. "I explained to NASA that at this point the story was out." AAAS proceeded to distribute a four-page press release, which had been in preparation for the scheduled announcement, with a lead that announced that the authors had found characteristics in the meteorite that "may be evidence of ancient Martian microorganisms."

Borchelt, the White House science public affairs officer, said that he agreed with Broadbent's decision to release information on the study. As a result, Boeder refused to take Borchelt's phone calls.

At the White House, officials were wrestling with the question of whether Clinton should issue a statement about the discovery. Morris wanted Clinton to react to the discovery by publicly pledging to send astronauts to Mars within five years. Borchelt was opposed to any statement: "It would be really an unusual circumstance for the President to comment on a scientific paper, no matter how exciting." Borchelt said that Gore played a key role in tipping the decision against a strong endorsement of the discovery by Clinton. The final decision was to delay the presidential statement until the next day. Borchelt said the delay prevented the presidential announcement from stealing publicity from the McKay paper itself. "I felt very strongly that we would be hijacking a news story for political purposes," he said.

In his statement, made the next day, Clinton called for further study of the meteorite. He announced plans for a bipartisan "space summit" to discuss the nation's space program and emphasized his commitment to robotic exploration of Mars. "If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered," he said.

Just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday, the Associated Press moved a second story by Recer that reported additional details, such as the presence of PAHs in the meteorite. This story quoted several scientists anonymously but, apparently, none from McKay's team. One of the sources, for example, was described as being "familiar with the study." This researcher was quoted as saying: "The finding was unequivocal. This could be one of the biggest discoveries ever."

At about the same time that the AP was transmitting Recer's second story, NASA headquarters released two press releases. One announced a press conference for the next day at which McKay and his colleagues would discuss their "findings showing strong circumstantial evidence of possible early Martian life." The second was a three-paragraph statement on the discovery by Goldin, that the "evidence is exciting, even compelling, but not conclusive," and he pledged to support further scientific inquiry into the subject. "I want everyone to understand that we are not talking about 'little green men.' These are extremely small, single-cell creatures that somewhat resemble bacteria on Earth," he explained.
By late afternoon, CNN was increasing its coverage of the meteorite discovery. At 5:09 p.m. Eastern time, aerospace correspondent Jim Slade described the fossilized bacteria to his worldwide audience: "As one source described it, they looked something like maggots." He would repeat that description on air at 8 p.m.

In photographs taken through a microscope, the putative bacteria do have a rumpled, tubular shape that looks something like a maggot. Slade's description undoubtedly helped viewers envision. But the bacteria were much, much smaller than maggots. Moreover, maggots are made of many cells, while a bacterium is a single cell.

. . . (the) decision to cancel the embargo came too late to help the prime-time network news broadcasts, and consequently, they were much thinner on detail and analysis.

For such reasons, Slade's simile upset AAAS' Broadbent. Moreover, in her view NASA was using the discovery as a way to attract headlines that served its interests regardless of the interests of the other scientists or AAAS. She noted that one of CNN's initial reports on the meteorite included a sound bite from a NASA scientist named Jack Farmer, who appeared to confirm the paper's conclusions on camera, saying: "If on Earth, why not on Mars? And I think, you know, we have to go there and look, and I think there's a reasonable possibility that we will find something." The report also included an illustration identical to one in the meteorite paper.

However, Farmer did not in fact break the embargo-because he wasn't talking about the Science paper. CNN had recorded the clip some months before in connection with general reporting on the prospects of finding life on Mars. The illustration was a publicly available photograph and the only one that the CNN producers could find. The fact that it appeared in the published paper was a coincidence, but Zare did not know that at the time. "It made it look like NASA was leaking more than it actually was," said David Salisbury, a Stanford University news officer, who also saw the clip.

The maggot metaphor also horrified Zare, the Stanford chemist who helped identify the PAHs in the meteorite. Zare had just returned from a trip to Woods Hole, MA when he heard on the afternoon of Monday, August 5, about Space News' story. At that point, Zare felt that the story was vague enough to give the scientists room to postpone any comments until August 15, as scheduled. But on Tuesday, NASA summoned him to Washington for the press conference on Wednesday. Zare, Stanford coauthor Simon Clemett, and Stanford press officer David Salisbury hastened to catch a 2 p.m. flight from San Francisco to Washington. But after the plane pulled away from the gate, it developed mechanical problems. The flight was canceled, and the Stanford trio was rescheduled to a 10 p.m. flight.

They waited in the United Airlines lounge at the San Francisco airport, where CNN was playing on one of the television sets. They heard the description of the fossilized bacteria as similar to maggots-and they were appalled. "The story was coming out quite wrong," Zare said. "There's a big difference between bacteria and a worm."

Salisbury agrees. "The problem with maggots as metaphor is that maggots are a misleading metaphor! The putative Martian nanofossils do not resemble maggots in size, complexity, organization or function! There is only a vague resemblance in shape."

He believes that inattentive viewers would have understood Slade's description as meaning that the meteorite contained either live maggots or maggot-sized fossils.

At 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, Broadbent reached Zare's group in the United Airlines lounge at the San Francisco airport. She notified them that AAAS was canceling the embargo, and she encouraged Zare and Clemett to make themselves available to the press immediately. AAAS' public affairs staff began calling reporters, starting on the East Coast because their deadlines were sooner, and offering them access to Zare. "We found people who were still on deadline and asked would they like to talk to an author," Broadbent said. Another reason for putting journalists in touch with Zare was the fact that Zare was a member of the editorial board of Science, Broadbent said. She said that Floyd Bloom, the journal's editor-in-chief, had told her: "Make sure that you take care of Zare. He's one of ours."

"Our primary concern was trying to get the story out as straight as possible," Salisbury said. "The best thing we could do was speak to as many people as we could and make sure that they had the basic story correct." Broadbent suggested some journalists for the Stanford researchers to contact, and the Stanford news office provided additional names. "Dick and Simon spent more than three hours straight on the phone talking to one person after another," Salisbury said. The journalists they spoke with included reporters from the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Zare also granted an interview to CNN and appeared on ABC's Nightline. Salisbury said that the Nightline coverage was particularly adept and probably set the tone for subsequent coverage by other journalists.

However, Broadbent's decision to cancel the embargo came too late to help the prime-time network news broadcasts, and consequently they were much thinner on detail and analysis. On CBS, for example, Diana Olick reported that "NASA scientists will announce that they have detected single-cell structures on the meteorite-possibly, tiny fossils, and chemical evidence of past biological activity. In other words, life on Mars." However, Olick concluded her report by noting that "some scientists argue this latest find is not conclusive and could be a false alarm." The report included video of Alex Treiman, a researcher at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, who downplayed the scientific evidence, saying "What they've got are indirect things that might have been formed by life and might not have."

The report on ABC World News Tonight was even more general. Bill Blakemore told viewers that "microscopic chemicals found in samples of the meteorite might well have been made by some sort of bacterial life." Unlike Olick, Blakemore did not tell viewers that some scientists disputed the conclusion that living organisms produced the chemicals.

By about 5:30 p.m. AAAS also was providing copies of the manuscript to journalists who requested it. This, coupled with Zare's availability, was helpful for print reporters who were scrambling on August 6 to put together stories for the next morning's editions. The Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe both quoted Zare's description of the research methodology that McKay's team used. In both cases, Zare was the only researcher from McKay's team to be quoted. Other print journalists relied heavily on the manuscript but did not appear to quote Zare or any other of the researchers involved in the project.

Aside from the absence of reporting from the paper's authors, the initial stories seemed reasonably accurate and well-balanced. Several of the articles included some variant of Goldin 's caution that NASA had not discovered little green men. The articles generally indicated that the scientists' conclusion was based on several lines of evidence. The articles included skeptical notes from other scientists in the field. One scientist, for example, told USA Today: "The conclusion is at best premature and more probably wrong."

One scientist...told USA Today: "The conclusion is at best premature and more probably wrong."

The first stories in the overseas press had less detail. Papers in the UK, for example, had deadlines before AAAS released the paper's text or encouraged Zare to start talking with journalists. As a result, the British stories that appeared on August 7 tended to rehash information that had been distributed by AP and other wire services, supplemented by reactions from British scientists.

Steve Maran, an astronomer and press officer for the American Astronomical Society, said that the story written by the New York Times' John Noble Wilford was particularly good. The article described the findings in detail, as well as possible challenges to the findings. Maran thought "Wilford really outdid himself, particularly since the journalist had the scientific article for only about a half day."

Savage, the NASA public affairs official, also said that he was satisfied with the early press coverage. He said it was "better than 90 to 95 percent correct. I saw plenty of caveats in there." One criticism he had was that the early reports relied heavily on scientists who were not connected with the research team.

Salisbury, the Stanford press officer, said that he was "impressed with the overall quality of the initial stories." He noted the fact that after the news broke on the day before the press conference, CNN broadcast a number of reports highlighting different aspects of the story and interviewing a variety of experts. "They put a heck of a lot of effort into it and did some superb TV reporting," Salisbury said.

An important reason for the quality of the coverage, he explained, was that press releases and video footage already had been prepared when the news leaked out. "Without all these preparations there is a good chance that the initial coverage of the story following the embargo break would have been less accurate." Zare agreed with this assessment.

Salisbury also maintains that although the scientists' caveats about the finding were widely reported at first, that changed in the following days. "As the initial reports were recycled, rewritten, and repackaged for the second, third, and fourth time, the less accurate they became."

Borchelt also was satisfied with the early coverage. "I think the news stories were basically very accurate, and I believe they did a good job of being appropriately skeptical telling their readers that this still had to be confirmed." One drawback, he said, was that reporters at first had difficulty in finding qualified scientists who were skeptical. "They were not prepared nor did reporters know how to get hold of them." But in subsequent days, those skeptics would be featured more prominently in follow-up news coverage.

The early stories also had a high degree of sameness about them, because journalists had little information to work with and little time in which to do it, Borchelt said. If the information had been disseminated under embargo, journalists would have had time to produce a greater variety of stories, he added. "Good reporters would have found other or more interesting angles to work. The kind of technologies used, for example, to elucidate the findings, and how the rocks were found in the first place. That was missing in almost all the stories. Why were we looking for rocks in Antarctica? Nothing in almost any of the stories. None of that."

After Broadbent decided to release the paper, AAAS posted it on two World Wide Web sites that it operates: EurekAlert!, which it uses to disseminate material to journalists; and Science Online, the Web version of Science. Early on Wednesday morning, AAAS faxed the galley proofs of the meteorite manuscript to all journalists on the distribution list for embargoed materials from Science. Attached to the paper was a note that provided a password for EurekAlert!, thus enabling journalists to download the manuscript, related press releases, and photos associated with the paper.

For Zare, Wednesday dawned as his redeye flight from California landed at Dulles International Airport outside Washington. He hadn't slept, because his seat on the packed jetliner was directly in front of the movie screen.

As he walked into the airport, he was met by dueling television crews from ABC's Good Morning America and NBC's Today show. Each crew thought they had arranged an exclusive interview with Zare, and they argued about which crew would get to conduct the interview. It was resolved by deciding that the Today show would interview Zare, and Good Morning America would interview his associate, Clemett. Before the interview, Zare changed clothes in the airport's bathroom.

Zare also called the National Science Foundation (NSF) to tell them about the discovery and his role in it. Even though he was head of the National Science Board, Zare had not yet said anything to NSF because of Science's rules requiring scientists to keep a paper confidential or lose the chance to publish in the journal. "I told them as soon as I could tell them," he said.

The Stanford trio then proceeded to NASA headquarters. Savage, the NASA press officer, strongly criticized them for granting any interviews. "They weren't happy that we had decided to talk," said Salisbury.

NASA then held a dress rehearsal for the press conference at which Goldin reportedly urged McKay not to "wimp out" by describing the finding of the fossilized bacteria as less than definitive. Schopf, the UCLA paleo-biologist, later recalled that Boeder told McKay's team that Schopf "demolished" the researchers' scientific arguments in the dress rehearsal.

The main auditorium in NASA's Washington headquarters was packed for the press conference, and journalists at several other NASA facilities across the country also participated via a satellite link, a standard feature of NASA press conferences. The event opened with a statement by Goldin in which he expressed "skeptical optimism" about the discovery and talked about the space agency's plans for further Mars exploration. Then Wesley T. Huntress, the NASA official in charge of space-science research, introduced the scientists who had conducted the Mars research. McKay, Gibson, Kathie Thomas-Keprta, and Zare each described various aspects of the research.

Next, Schopf commented on the paper, calling himself a skeptical optimist about the claimed discovery. (At no time did Schopf or any of the other speakers mention Schopf's early involvement with the project, although the paper did include a footnoted acknowledgment of his assistance, and Schopf did note it in a book written three years later.) He cited several drawbacks and limitations to the research and concluded, "a certain amount of additional work needs to be done, before we can have firm confidence in the finding."

Schopf later complained to a journalist that he had been "sandbagged" by NASA at the press conference. The press conference used two photographs of the fossilized bacteria that he had never seen, and the photographs did not include any markers that would indicate the exceedingly small size of the fossils.

Finally, the press conference was opened to questions from journalists, both those in the auditorium and those at other NASA facilities. Reporters asked about issues such as technical details of the discovery, the discovery's likely impact on NASA's budget, and NASA's plans for further Mars exploration.

The press conference placed NASA's stamp on the discovery and minimized the roles of others. For example, in his opening comments, Goldin introduced Neal Lane, the head of NSF, which was responsible for the meteorite's discovery. NSF at the time was enmeshed in legislative wrangles over the future of its Antarctic projects, and the agency could have benefited strongly from beneficial publicity related to the meteorite. But Lane was not invited to speak at the press conference. He stood momentarily in response to Goldin's introduction of him. (Several days later, NSF held a press conference of its own that featured two other researchers connected to the project. One was the woman who discovered the meteorite in Antarctica. The other was the researcher who led the meteorite-hunting expedition under NSF auspices; this researcher recently had co-authored a letter in the journal Nature that suggested the carbonate blobs in the meteorite were produced by a geological process. Fewer journalists attended this press conference.)

Zare said that Stanford also was denied publicity from NASA's press conference. "I believe that the people who put it together put it together with the idea of how to boost NASA in mind," he said. "The NASA people clearly wished that I would be a "NASA scientist' and nothing more." (In a content analysis of British news coverage of the announcement, Holliman found that the coverage did not mention Stanford or other institutions that were involved in the project, producing the impression that the discovery was NASA's alone).

The end of the press conference didn't mean rest for Zare. During the preparations for the planned announcement of the discovery, Zare and Salisbury had planned to submit an opinion piece to the New York Times that would explore Zare's reactions to the discovery. When the story leaked prematurely, the director of Stanford's news office contacted the Times. Zare's draft maintained that the discovery showed the value of basic science, but the Times wanted the piece revised to focus on Martian research. The Times' deadline was 4 p.m.; Zare and Salisbury had to rush back to their hotel after the press conference ended so that they could review the Times' editing of the piece.

Zare was irritated by one statement that the Times had inserted: "Scientific research often yields surprising, synergistic results. That is why science should be supported for its own sake." Zare said he disagrees with such a statement because he believes that science should be supported only if it provides benefits to society. "But I found I had to live with that if I wanted my op-ed piece published."

After reviewing the Times piece, Zare had to rush to the studio of PBS' News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Originally, Zare was supposed to appear along with McKay, but NASA officials decided that Huntress was a better match for Zare, so Huntress was sent in place of McKay.

"At this point, I was 30-some hours without sleep," Zare said. "I am punch drunk." Nonetheless, Zare said, he didn't make any mistakes in the televised interview.

Coverage of the press conference was enormous. The press conference was carried live on CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS. CBS' coverage, including an interview with Goldin, "will probably compete in TV history annals for the longest time devoted to a news story" claimed a report on the news coverage prepared by NASA's public affairs staff.

On CBS, Dan Rather told viewers that the scientists offered "circumstantial proof" of their conclusions. In a report on the NASA press conference, Olick told CBS viewers that the researchers believe that they had found "Martian microfossils." Olick also noted the existence of "skeptics" and quoted Schopf as saying "Let us remember that the mere presence of organic matter by itself does not say it's part of life." Olick's report also showed a slide, used by McKay's team, to compare the putative Martian fossils with undisputed microfossils from the Columbia River basin in Washington State. (Schopf later objected to the use of that slide as misleading because the supposed Martian fossils were far smaller than the Washington fossils but were reproduced as the same size in the slide.)

On ABC World News Tonight, Ned Potter told viewers that the researchers had found "deposits that could be the residue of dead bacteria;" a reference to the PAHs. "Most striking, though not by itself conclusive, the scientists showed microscope pictures of tiny tube-shaped objects hidden in the rock. ... NASA says they may actually be fossils of primitive cells." Potter then struck a note of caution: "But on this day of wild enthusiasm, many scientists are concerned that researchers' usual caution is getting lost." Following was the same quote from Schopf that Olick's report had used: "Let us remember that the mere presence of organic matter by itself does not say it's part of life."

Of course, the networks were not the only broadcast outlets to cover the finding. The NASA public-affairs report concluded that more than 1,000 stories on the meteorite were broadcast in the nation's top 39 television markets in less than a week. "The story of possible life on Mars eclipsed most former (space) news events such as Apollo 11, the (space) shuttle's first flight, and the (explosion of the shuttle) Challenger," concluded the report.

The enthusiasm of the NASA public affairs report regarding the quantity of television coverage-and the corresponding lack of analysis of the extent of newspaper coverage probably reflects the agency's high priority on television coverage. Nonetheless, newspaper coverage-also was extensive, both in the U.S. and internationally. Newspapers were faced with the fact that readers would have been inundated with news of the discovery during the previous evening. Thus, in their coverage the morning after the NASA press conference, newspapers tended to treat the discovery as a "second-day story," focusing on matters other than the discovery itself. For example, Newsday's focus was on the doubts raised by various experts about the analysis in the meteorite paper. USA Today detailed the "detective story" of the scientists' painstaking research. The New York Times and the Washington Post explored the discovery's political ramifications for NASA.

The Internet also was abuzz. NASA's own Web site received more than 500,000 "hits" in a single day. Posting the paper on its Web sites also proved to be an inexpensive and easy way for AAAS to distribute the information: In a matter of days, almost one million Internet users obtained the study.

In the several years since the announcement by McKay's team, the federal government sharply increased its funding for research into exobiology and meteorites. McKay's team reported finding similar signs of life in a second meteorite. Other scientists tried to test the validity of the conclusions reached by McKay and his colleagues. In the process, one journalist concludes, the ALH 84001 meteorite "has become the most intensively studied two kilograms of rock in history."

Researchers outside McKay's team increasingly came to believe that the round structures in the meteorite could not be fossilized bacteria, as McKay's group proposed, because they were too small to have room for the biomolecular systems that a living organism needs. Outside researchers similarly concluded that PAHs are not a convincing sign of life because they could have been produced by contamination. Two years after the publication of the Science paper, another science journalist concluded: "The scientific consensus now is that the meteorite provides no convincing evidence for life on Mars."

The Mars Meteorite: A Case Study in Controls on Dissem-ination of Science News, Public Understanding of Science, January 2000. http://hplus.harvard.edu/ejournals/ipj_public.html

Vincent Kiernan is a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education and a doctoral candidate in the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park. He can be reached at kiernan@wam.umd.edu.