Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Arsenic and Odd Life

Episode Date: December 6, 2010

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Arsenic and odd life, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and this is astrobiologist Felisa Wolff-Simon. What I've presented to you today is a microbe doing something different than life as we knew it. I was taught as a biochemist that all life on Earth, all life we know of, to harken back to the pale blue dot ideas of Carl Sagan, all life we know of is here so far. And if there's an organism on Earth doing something different, we've cracked open the door to what's possible for life elsewhere in the universe.

And that's profound, and to understand how life is formed and where life is going. This microbe substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its basic biomolecules. And what else might we find? What else might we want to look for? NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow Felisa Wolf-Simon. She leads the team that has discovered the first life form on our planet that appears to use arsenic rather than phosphorus for many of its most essential functions and molecules, including its DNA.

We'll be postponing our conversation about the James Webb Space Telescope so that we can bring you special coverage of this surprising and amazing discovery. Bill Nye will give us an introduction to the topic in a couple of minutes. Then we'll hear from Mary Wojtek, head of NASA's Astrobiology Program. Amazing discovery. Bill Nye will give us an introduction to the topic in a couple of minutes. Then we'll hear from Mary Wojtek, head of NASA's astrobiology program. Mary joined Felisa and other scientists in the December 2nd press conference that revealed this news. Bruce Betts will join me in person this week for a What's Up Gander at the Night Sky, including another chance to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Let's begin with Emily Lakdawalla's look at the Planetary Society blog.

We had some audio problems with Emily's Skype connection, but I was pretty sure you'd want to hear her anyway. Emily, it is looking like it's going to be quite a month, this holiday month of December. I'm hoping that we can start with something that you're doing on a monthly basis now. You just published the latest What's Up in the Solar System. That's right. December is going to be a busy month, no different from any other month. I think the highlight this month will be the arrival of Japan's Akatsuki at Venus on December 7th, which may have already happened by the time some of you are listening to this.

It's a climate orbiter to study Venus's clouds. It's actually got a really cool orbit that manages to stay stationary over Venus's super rotating atmosphere, and they're going to do a lot of mutual observations with Venus Express. It's going to be cool. And we'll put the link up, of course, to Emily's What's Up in the Solar System. There's all kinds of good stuff happening. There's another way that Emily is celebrating the holiday season, and this is, I think, the second time around for you with your Advent calendar. Yeah, it's my second annual Advent calendar, which is an idea that I shamelessly stole from the Boston Globe's Big Picture blog, which does a Hubble Advent calendar every year that I highly recommend.

Last year, my Advent calendar featured different globes of the solar system, different global views of small bodies and planets. This time around, I tried to get as opposite to that as I possibly could by zooming in on all of these landscapes. And when you zoom in, when you fill the frame with these things, you often can't tell what exactly it is that you're looking at. So I'm challenging readers to try to figure it out for themselves before they scroll down and identify the place in the solar system

where that landscape came from. And there is one that has already been given away here, at least to a degree, and that one has got to be pretty near and dear to your heart. It's your door number four, December 4 image. Well, I didn't quite get a chance to drive a spacecraft, but almost. With the HiWish program on HiRISE, the camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, any member, any user on the internet can log into their website and suggest a location on mars where you can get a picture taken and i've submitted seven or eight requests i've had three of them come back this second one was of a place in aries valis one of the ancient outflow channels on mars and i was hoping to see some cool flow features and some different rock types but that's

not quite what happened when we zoomed in what we saw was a lot of small impact craters and a lot of dust, which is really quite typical for Martian landscapes. It's very pretty, but it doesn't have the kinds of features that I was hoping to be able to interpret and learn something geologically. Which just goes to show that even with the very best instruments available, exploring the solar system is a hard thing to do. One last thing, as the world was going a bit crazy over arsenic and odd life last week you kept looking at some other stories and then caught up in an interesting way by asking for some help

that's right i i figured that there were enough smart people paying attention to the story that i really didn't need to so i just waited till after it was over and asked the hive mind of twitter to recommend what they thought were the best write-ups based on written by people who had actually done the research read the original paper paper, and I posted a list of those onto the blog. And we'll have links to that, of course, at the show page. Go to planetary.org and come on over to this week's show from there. Emily, thanks a lot. Have a wonderful month, and we'll talk to you again next week. All right. See you then, Matt. Emily Lakdawal is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We'll take another look at that arsenic and odd life with one of the sources of that news. That'll be after we hear Bill's take on the topic. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, executive director of the Planetary Guy here, Executive Director of the Planetary Society. And this week, I appeared on television several times to talk about arsenic and deep space. Wait, arsenic and Mona Lake. Wait, arsenic and bacteria. That's right. So these people who are funded largely by the NASA, the National Aeronautic and Space Administration Astrobiology Division, got some bacteria from Mona Lake, which is in the state of California in North America in the United States.

And these bacteria live in an environment with a lot of arsenic. And it occurred to the principal investigator, Felisa Wolf-Simon, that perhaps if she took out the phosphorus and just left them arsenic, these bacteria would, if I may, find a way to get by. Well, here's the deal. See, on the periodic table, phosphorus is above arsenic. In other words, the number of electrons on the outside of both of these atoms are the same. So maybe in a way, one atom could substitute for another. That's what she thought. And she was right. No, it's not that these bacteria can live with arsenic and not die. No, no, they take the arsenic in and get rid of the phosphorus.

And they build their DNA, their instructions for making cells out of arsenic. This sounds like a trivial thing. And several investigators, journalists on television asked me about this several times. And it's a big deal. No one thought it was possible for a living thing to run on arsenic instead of phosphorus. This sounds arcane. What it means is there may be other types of life in the universe, and we have to have other ways of looking for them. Even weirder, there'd be other types of life right here on Earth, and we just haven't asked the right questions to for them. Even weirder, there'd be other types of life right here on Earth, and we just haven't asked the right questions to find them. If we find these other strange

types of life, arsenic, phosphorus being but one example, it could, dare I say it, change the world. It is a big deal. It's a discovery about living things that no one anticipated. It's very exciting. I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. I'm grateful to Bill for that introduction to our main topic this week. You've already heard the news from Felisa Wolf-Simon. to our main topic this week. You've already heard the news from Felisa Wolf-Simon.

It came to us during a December 2nd press conference at NASA's Washington headquarters. That press conference included comments from an astounded James Elser at Arizona State. Elser speculated about possible practical applications for bacteria that essentially eat deadly arsenic. Also participating was Stephen Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. He is a past guest of Planetary Radio. Benner provided a bit of counterpoint to Wolf-Simon's unbridled enthusiasm.

We have a link to a NASA article about the discovery of bacterium GFHA-1 on this week's show page. You can reach it from planetary.org. The article also includes the very cool video that Wolf Simon used during her presentation. Sitting with Felisa was the director of NASA's astrobiology program, Mary Wojtek. Mary was a biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey when she was tapped for this job two years ago. She is proud of the interdisciplinary approach the program has embraced and proud of the science it has helped foster, including this latest discovery. Mary, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio,

especially, what, just over an hour after this news, I won't call it earth-shattering, but is awfully important in the world of life sciences. Let me ask you a question that could be pulled out of any biology textbook on this planet. True or false, phosphorus is absolutely essential to every form of life on earth. I'm glad we're starting with an easy question. That would be true. Absolutely. Of all the elements that all life uses, phosphorus and nitrogen and carbon are three of the most important. And phosphorus, of course, is what we're here to talk about today. What about this new microbe found in a place that a lot of Californians have visited, Mono Lake?

Well, the incredible thing about this organism is it was isolated from Mono Lake, as you mentioned, this organism is it was isolated from Mona Lake, as you mentioned, an environment that has high salinity, high alkalinity. It's got a pH of 10. It's a soda lake and has very high levels of arsenic. This organism is able to use arsenic in place of its phosphorus. And phosphorus is an element that's used, people may know, in molecules like DNA. It makes up its backbone. The battery, biological battery in a cell is called ATP, and the P is phosphorus, and in this cell it's going to be AT arsenic. And also in phospholipids, it make up the membranes of your cells, as well as molecules that are involved in phosphorylating proteins, which I know that sounds like a mouthful, but that basically just activates it. So proteins that do the work in your cells are

able to carry out its work. But this microbe gets by without it. Without any phosphorus, very little phosphorus, but is growing nearly as well as it does when it's got it when you have arsenic there instead. NASA has been part of investigating astrobiology for, what, about 50 years. Where is this discovery in the context of this five-decade search? Well, I have to say, as you mentioned, we just actually celebrated our 50th anniversary. And at that celebration, we highlighted some major findings, sort of a top ten greatest list, and many of them changed how we fundamentally thought about life. We funded Carl Woese, who discovered the third domain of life.

Before that, we thought there was just bacteria and eukaryotes, which make up plants and ourselves, but he found this other domain called the archaea. Many discoveries came in our first 50 years. This is an incredible way to kick off the next 50. We sort of predicted it was going to be a great next 50 years, and what a way within months of our anniversary to put something again that I think is game-changing or paradigm-shifting in biology out there for scientists to mull over and further explore.

I'll say. This work was led by Felisa Wolf-Simon, a pretty young scientist. And boy, listening to her at the news conference, all I could think was, I wish I'd been in her classes. Oh, she is a dynamic instructor. I have talked to many high school students that she has interacted with. She taught when she was in graduate school. I learn every time I have conversations with her. She's really one of our rising stars.

Lots of energy, lots of interest. And one of the most interesting things about Felisa is she was originally a music major. She was an oboist from Oberlin College and just became interested in science, and we are very thankful that it caught her interest. She said during the news conference that what we need to do is what she did in this case, think about life and ask some very basic and simple questions about how it works. Do you think that's an accurate description of how she came up with this? Yeah. I mean, I think that too often we are satisfied with what we know already, and we move forward from that. And, you know, that's a very productive way to advance science. We build on what we've already learned. But sometimes it takes either new people coming into the field or someone, as she said, I'm sure you'll remember she said a number of times,

she likes to consider the exception. And it's often that exception that is what tells us the most or really changes how we fundamentally think about things. And if you're not open to it, you're not going to see it. And, you know, I think this is a perfect example of that. More from NASA Astrobiology Chief Mary Wojtek in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration.

The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members

can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Mary Wojtek is the microbiologist who leads NASA's astrobiology program. She joined us last week, just minutes after the announcement, of a discovery that will be rewriting biology textbooks. Bacterium GFHA-1 is the first living thing ever found that has managed to substitute arsenic for one of the basic building blocks of life, phosphorus.

It made me think of a conversation I had with another Planetary Radio guest early this year. We've had Paul Davies on this show talking about the search for extraterrestrial life. He and others have talked about, well, why don't we look here first for a second or a parallel genesis? Is there any possibility that this bacterium is that?

That it evolved independently from other life on Earth? I would say that while I suspect what Paul is talking about is certainly a possibility and everyone's, it's a fruitful area of research, this bacteria comes from a very common group of bacteria that aren't particularly distinguished in their age. You know, they're relatively recent. The group that it's part of, the gamma proteobacteria, is the same group that E. coli, which is in our gut, in the guts of all warm-blooded animals.

It's also related to a lot of bacteria that cause diseases. So, you know, I think it would be very difficult to make that argument with this particular discovery on this particular organism, but is the metabolism and the different biochemistry that it's exhibiting evidence of a different genesis? I don't know, but it's certainly evidence of a different strategy for life to utilize the elements on Earth. In fact, I got the impression that if you were to look at this bacterium going about its daily life without taking the extra measures that Felice's team did, you probably would just say, oh, yeah, that's just another species of bacteria.

Absolutely. In fact, if all she did was pull it out, sequence it, we would have said yawn. You know, like I said, it's a very common, common group that, you know, it's important. As I mentioned, you know, just to humans, the two examples I gave, it also holds a lot of the important organisms that do a lot of the important biogeochemical cycling in our world. And so it just would not be necessarily that interesting. You'll forgive me, I hope, because it's way too early to ask you to speculate on this sort of topic. early to ask you to speculate on this sort of topic, but how do you think that this discovery may change how we conduct astrobiological research in the coming years? In my mind,

and I'm sorry I didn't make this clear there, because at the press conference, her study is an example of our success. Our program for the research analysis part of it has chosen to take this multidisciplinary approach to bring together biologists, chemists, biochemists, geologists, astronomers, to answer these fundamental questions at the credentials and the backgrounds of her co-PIs and collaborators, is a perfect example of the productivity and fruitfulness of those kinds of collaborations. In terms of what this means for how we then extend what we've learned about life on Earth to NASA's overall mission for looking for life on other planets, I think that this broadens the scope of what we should consider. I think that that's very important. You know, there's been an ongoing scientific discussion. Do we target specific diagnostic biosignatures like a specific

molecule DNA or a specific molecule ATP if we're going to go and look for life? Well, I think that this demonstrates that if we are too specific and we go and we look for that very specifics, we may miss the whole story. So it's very possible that if an organism is doing a completely different biochemistry, we'll just not see it. I often say, if we go somewhere and we see a human, a dog, you know, a plant, we'll know that's life. I don't think we have any problem. We're mostly worried about going someplace and not being able to recognize it because we've narrowed our search. I loved your comparison, and listeners know I never miss a chance to pick up a Star Trek reference. The Horta, those silicon-based life forms, they turn out to be intelligent as well.

Yes. But, I mean, something completely unexpected. Yes, absolutely. And I think it's on the same order of that, you know, now science fiction becomes fact. We're almost out of time. I've got to ask you, though, about how this story, leading up to the news conference, really took off. I mean, saying to a biologist that the story went viral is an interesting way to put it. As often happens on the Internet, some people began to expect a bit too much.

You heard from one reporter who I think was hoping and maybe disappointed that you didn't walk out and introduce Marvin the Martian. Yeah, it's hard to manage the public's expectations. Martian. Yeah, it's hard to manage the public's expectations. I think that, you know, with embargoed science, where you're allowed to tease them with what we're going to talk about, but not give too many of the specifics. You know, on one hand, it was great that people were interested, and I'm sorry that they're disappointed. And I hope that we were able, with the experts we assembled and the discussion that we provided, convince people that, you know, in many regards, this is just as exciting

and may even be more important to your everyday life because of how it's going to affect you here on Earth. And perhaps even practical uses for this that we were hearing speculation about. We'll leave it at that. I will absolutely recommend to folks that they go to the NASA TV site, where I hope that this news conference is going to be archived. If it is, we'll put a link to it from our show page that you can reach from planetary.org. And hear the rest of this terrific news conference with really some of the most exciting news that I think I've heard in this sort of setting in a very long time.

Mary, again, thank you for joining us, and please pass along... That was my pleasure, Matt. Pass along our congratulations to Felisa and her team. Oh, she will appreciate it. Thanks so much. You bet. Mary Wojtek is at NASA headquarters. She's a senior scientist for astrobiology in the Planetary Science Division and leads

NASA's astrobiology program. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. It took coming up to the Planetary Society on a Sunday afternoon, and it's cold in here, but I am finally once again sitting across the table from Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome. Mr. Scrooge doesn't let us put coal in the fire, especially as not on a Sunday, even though we're supposed to work.

Christmas Eve, Mr. Nye. Bah humbug. So what's up? The disclaimer that was not mr nye nor do we use coal oddly enough to heat the building but indeed we do save electricity by having the building cold uh what is up bright planets hanging out so jupiter still dominating the evening sky brightest star-like object up in the south in the evening. Pre-dawn, you've got Venus super bright over in the east, above it the star Spica in Virgo, and above that much dimmer Saturn.

But what we've also got coming up, peaking on December 13th and 14th, the Geminid meteor shower, the most reliable meteor shower of the year. It can be up to 100 meteors per hour from a really dark site. But in the meantime, I also want to start mentioning, it's a little ways off, but I do love a good total lunar eclipse. And we've got one coming up this month, December 20th, for those of us on the West Coast Pacific time. December 21st, universal time, but it's that night of December 20th in any case.

And it is optimized for we North America kind of people this time around. We'll discuss more details coming later on, but it's going to be late in the evening, moving into the middle of the night for North America. Very cool, December 20th, 21st. we move on to this week in space history. It was a busy week in space history. Variety of things. 1998, Unity and Zarya modules were connected to form the International Space Station Corps. And, of course, they're still partying on up there.

To 1972, the launch and landing of Apollo 17. Last footsteps on the moon. Also, Galileo probe slammed into Jupiter's atmosphere 15 years ago, taking cool data and vanishing and melting in the pot of Jupiter. So as not to harm any of those moons, especially Europa, a temp no landings here. Well, actually, and perhaps I was unclear, this was the atmospheric probe. Oh, my mistake.

After a glorious, successful orbital mission that they slammed the orbiter in so we would attempt no landings on Europa. This one was to go check out a nice dry spot in the Jupiter atmosphere. Yeah, 15 years ago. I should have known. You should have known, man. Just not thinking today. Hey, what do we got next?

I think you know what's next, but what we have is another treat from our listener, Brandon Cook, who is just going hog wild. Let's listen to this one. Oh, hey there, Bob. Hey, Jim. Checking the fax machine again? Yeah, we get all these junk faxes. I mean,

look at this. Free training seminar, condo in Florida, joke of the day. It's getting as bad as email. What's that one coming through? Oh, this one? It's from a guy called Bruce Betts. I'm sure it's as worthless as the others. Now, hold on. This one actually looks interesting, and it's titled Random Space Facts. I like space. Let's just see what Bruce Betts has to say in his random space facts. at Vandenberg Air Force Base. For the United States, this was the first unmanned, unhumanned probe space plane kind of thing that both went up and then landed on a runway. And the only time this has been done before was the Soviets with their one-time launch of the space shuttle lookalike, Buran.

Buran, Buran, Buran. It's so a copy. We'll get back to this in just a little bit. Nice work by Brandon, huh? It was. It was very nice. Very amusing. And, you know, that's how I originally conceived of random space facts. And before we showed up with a radio show. We were just going to fax it to people. We were just faxing them all over the country. It became cause prohibitive quickly. Let us go on to the trivia contest. And we asked you about Space Shuttle Discovery, which will launch eventually, now postponed until February.

We asked you how many launches has Discovery had? Because it has the most flights of any orbiter, longest operational history of any orbiter. And how'd we do, Matt? Turns out a lot more flights than the next runner up. Our winner, and it's been a couple of years, I think, David Weatherholt. David Weatherholt of Newport News, Virginia, about two years since he had another winner in the contest. Discovery has flown 38 flights. That's 5,247 orbits and 322 days in space.

David, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Congratulations. I do want to mention Andy Fleming. He said that for me, there's a very special local element in Space Shuttle Discovery's name. It's named after HMS Discovery, one of the ships used in the third major voyage of famous British explorer James Cook, Captain James Cook. And it actually sailed from someplace about 10 miles from Andy's home there over in jolly old England.

Jolly good. We go on to the next trivia contest. We return to our friend, the Buran shuttle. Turn to our friend, the Buran shuttle. What airplane ferried the Buran? Just like in the U.S., there's a modified 747 that ferries the space shuttle. What was the airplane that ferried the Buran? But wait, don't order yet.

You need to give me more. You need to tell me what is the claim to fame of this airplane besides shuttling Buran. Huh. Okay. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. Now, this time you have until the 13th. I got it wrong last week. I said that last week's deadline was the 13th when it should have been the 6th.

This time, Monday, December 13 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up in the night sky and think about beautiful butterflies..m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about beautiful butterflies. Thank you, and good night. And the lowly caterpillars that they once were. A nice role model for all of us.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Mike Brown, destroyer of Pluto, is celebrating his new book with a party. You can join us there next week on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies! Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова