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Feb. 16, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:07:43
Edition 431 - Dr Patricia Ann Straat

The remarkable Dr Patricia Ann Straat - now aged 84 - who was part of the Viking Lander team's amazing and controversial "life on Mars" mission - the "Labeled Release Project"...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you very, very much for all of your emails and contacts recently.
I do see every email as it comes in.
And don't forget, if your email requires a specific response, then of course you'll get one.
Very grateful for guest suggestions.
The person we'll be speaking to on this edition of the show was suggested by listener Jay Parmar.
Jay, thank you for your suggestion.
And, you know, you'll be pleased that I followed it through.
And I think it's going to be worth it.
So thank you.
But that's just one example of many people who email regularly.
If it's possible for you to find contact details for the person, that's going to make my work easier, actually setting things up.
I think I've said before that I love the process of producing shows, the technical process of that, and the speaking of the shows.
Of course, I enjoy those things.
The thing that I find, I've been, I'm pretty good at it.
It's just not the part that I enjoy is the setting up.
So thank you to Haley, who helps me a great deal with setting up these shows and has been helping me for more than a year now on setting up these shows.
And thank you very much to Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, without whom I could not do any of this because he set up the website, keeps it going and gets the shows out to you each and every week that we do them.
Thank you for your support over these years.
If you've left a donation for the unexplained recently, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
If you haven't, then as I always say, but I'll say it very quickly this time, I promise, if you could consider making a donation to the show because it is vital.
In this uncertain world in which we all exist, and certainly as a broadcaster, I exist in a very, very uncertain world.
It would make a big difference.
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You can do all of that through the website, theunexplained.tv.
I love, as a journalist, stories.
And the stories I like most are the stories of remarkable people who do and have done remarkable things.
You are about to hear one of those stories on this edition of The Unexplained.
It is something that I don't think, because I was very young then, I ever fully grasped.
But I have a dim recollection when Jay emailed me about this.
Some of it came back.
But it was a long time ago.
I was very young.
And to tell you the truth, I was more interested in those days in, you know, going to school and watching television and listening to Rose, just discovering radio.
So it was a long time ago.
But it is the story, and some of these details, if you're of a certain age, will come back to you too.
It was the story of a mission to Mars.
Now, we're talking about the 1970s here, the mid to late 1970s, a time when the idea of a manned mission to Mars was definitely science fiction, although some scientists were talking about it.
The only way you could get anywhere was to send a probe there and then listen back for any sounds that it might send you or any images that it might effectively fax back to you, like those old fax machines.
Well, that was the case in the instance of the Viking mission in 1976, which went to Mars.
But there was something remarkable about the Viking mission.
And it raised questions that are continuing to be asked today.
The questions revolve around whether that Viking mission, back in 1976, back in the 70s, discovered life.
Perhaps not as we know it.
And the people behind it championed their cause for a very long time.
Well, we're going to speak with one of those people on this edition of The Unexplained, Dr. Patricia Ann Straart, was one of the main movers in the Viking mission, had a big part in it.
She's written a book about her story and wants to get it out there for reasons that you will hear.
So I think this is going to be potentially one of the most fascinating shows that we've ever done from somebody who was an insider in NASA's space program, doing something that didn't involve putting boots down on the surface of the moon, you know, designing the lunar lander or anything like that, but was to do with something else, to do with Mars, where of course a lot of focus is now placed with private missions to Mars planned and NASA planning to do its thing, and maybe others coming on board too, quite literally.
So we're all focused on Mars now.
And to think that 44 years ago, there was a stunningly interesting story to do with Mars, that's a bit of a mind-blower, isn't it?
Don't you think?
We're about to find out with Dr. Patricia Ann Stratt from the United States on this edition of The Unexplained.
Now, we're having to do this in the way that we did shows years ago.
And I know that some of the American shows still work this way.
This one will be done on a digital telephone connection.
So it's going to be a phone call.
But then, if you remember, that's the way we used to do things.
And if you remember Art Bell, I don't think Art Bell, maybe he did one or two.
But I don't think Art Bell used digital connections or Skype or anything like that.
He may have done in his latter years, but I don't think I ever heard him do one.
I don't think he was that comfortable with them.
I don't think he trusted them.
Of course, I do an awful lot of my stuff on Skype and digital connections.
But it all began, for me here doing this podcast, with what they call a telephone balancing unit that I had to buy secondhand from somebody in Cyprus who shipped it out to me and I hoped it would work.
And that allows you to connect recording equipment to the public telephone network.
And that's how we used to do things.
So that's kind of the way we're going to do this one.
So I hope you enjoyed.
Please let me know.
And please stay in touch with my show.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv and send me an email right now.
Remember those things, who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
All right, sit back.
Get ready for quite a story with Dr. Patricia Ann Stratt in the U.S. Dr. Strutt, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Howard.
Well, nice to speak with you.
Whereabouts in the United States are you?
And I know I can call you Pat because we agreed that beforehand.
So, Pat, where are you in the U.S.?
I'm in Maryland, just outside of Baltimore.
Well, I hope the weather is being kind to you.
You know, we Brits Are very hung up on the weather.
We're always talking about it.
So, you know, I hope that you haven't got snow that's deep and crisp and even at the moment.
We haven't had snow yet this year, which is just wonderful as far as I'm concerned.
I like to go to the snow.
I don't like the snow to come to me.
You know, I am going to remember that quote because I'm going to say that too.
We haven't had snow for such a long time here in London.
Now, tell me a little bit about yourself, because you had a long career in NASA as a scientist.
But more than that, I don't know a great deal.
So fill me in on the details of, you know, how you came up in the world and how you got yourself into working for NASA.
Well, I was never a NASA employee.
We did contract work for NASA.
I was co-experimenter of one of the three life detection tests that landed on Mars on the 1976 Viking mission.
The experiment was the labeled release experiment, and it was one of three life detection experiments, and it was actually positive for microbial life.
The problem was that nothing else was positive for microbial life, so it's been controversial for all these 40 plus years.
I have to say that, look, I was a little kid in the 70s, and I loved anything to do with space.
Of course I did.
You know, what little boy wouldn't, you know, in England or America.
I don't remember this story.
I mean, we've leapt ahead a great deal because I wanted to talk a little bit about your scientific beginnings and that sort of stuff.
But, I mean, that is the reason why we're speaking now, that you were involved in something that not only made headlines around the world, but also continues to this day, decades on, to cause controversy.
That's exactly right.
The labeled release experiment was positive for microbial life, but nothing else was positive for microbial life.
Many people have tried to replicate the labeled release results non-biologically, but nobody has ever succeeded.
So it remains a big controversy to this date.
Well, the results have been published many, many times, but there's a story of how that experiment got to Mars.
And I worked hand in hand with the engineers for six years prior to the landing.
I was on the flight team during the mission, and I have written many publications, many publications, since the mission explaining the results.
But I've just recently wrote a book on a behind-the-scenes story of this experiment.
Okay, let's wind back a little then from the details of the mission and the experiment, which are going to be fascinating, I know, from what you've just told me alone.
But what about you?
Because let me wind back a little bit myself.
I watched a movie two nights ago here, and I had no idea about any of this, but it was a movie about the real-life story of a couple of women who worked for NASA.
I know that you worked with NASA and not for NASA.
But back in the 60s, I think they were working.
They had a tremendous, you know, a tremendous struggle to get the same recognition that the men got.
Obviously, we are more enlightened these days.
Hidden figures?
Yes, hidden figures.
Exactly that matters.
What a wonderful book that was.
Yep, but what a wonderful book and a wonderful movie, too.
I have no idea about any of this.
But I guess seen in the context of its times, then women did have a harder job of establishing themselves.
We know that through history.
It tells us that.
It's wrong, and it's being corrected now.
So what was your route through science, you know, to getting the work that you got?
What was that like?
Was it difficult for you?
Well, my background is actually in biochemistry.
And after I graduated from college, where I majored in psychology, I decided I wanted to go into biochemistry.
So I became a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and did get my PhD in biochemistry and with sort of a minor in biophysics.
And then I went on to a postdoctoral fellowship, still at Johns Hopkins, but now at the medical school, where I worked for four years in molecular biology and then became an assistant professor in the same department.
Well, I was looking for a career move.
I'd been at Hopkins long enough, and I was interested in a career move.
And I had been casually looking around when this guy, Gilbert Levin, called me up, and he had just been awarded a contract from NASA for the labeled release experiment to go to Mars.
And he asked me to come and interview with him to possibly work on that experiment.
Well, I can tell you that it really blew my mind to go work.
The thought of working on Mars in 1970 was so far out, you know.
How old were you then?
How old was I in 1970?
Well, let's see, I was about 34.
Okay, so you were, I mean, you were at the beginning of your career then.
Yes, but I was already an assistant professor at Hopkins.
So, you know, my career was headed to an academic future.
And if you became an assistant professor at 34, then you must have been what we would call over here a real high flyer.
Bearing in mind what I alluded to just a moment ago, though, as a woman doing that, was that difficult for you?
It sounds as if you didn't face any barriers or difficulties.
If I did, I went around them.
I never let anything get in my way.
And I never, I would not accept a job that was what I called beneath me.
And I was determined I was going to follow my career, the career that I wanted to follow.
Wow, you sound tremendously determined and good on you, too.
What kind of a background did you have then?
You know, the way that you grew up and stuff like that, there must be something in your makeup that gave you that grit and determination.
Anybody who goes into a field like that, it's hotly competitive.
You know, how did you acquire that level of determination to do that and not let anything stand in your way?
Well, I had never, I never did let anything stand in my way.
I can tell you my father was a physicist, and maybe that inspired me some.
But all my life I was determined I was going to be the best.
Right.
So you were headhunted by this man, Gilbert Levin, who we will talk a lot about because he was your, you know, he was the boss of the project.
You were his partner in the project.
You were the two main movers in this project to send this material to Mars.
Talk to me about him then.
Well, Gil, he was an interesting guy.
I went down that first day for an interview with him.
And on my way down there, I wondered why I was bothering because I really wasn't particularly interested in going into private industry.
But I got there, and he was absolutely fascinating.
He had so many interesting, unusual ideas.
And the most exciting of those ideas was this experiment that he had designed that had been selected to go to Mars.
Well, that was so far out to me.
But I liked the whole approach of this guy, that he wanted to have fun and research.
And I don't know, I thought about it for a few days.
He made a very attractive offer to me.
And, of course, all my friends thought it was a suicidal career move.
And, of course, I did not really disagree with them.
But, you know, I thought it sounded like just so much fun and so interesting.
And I figured that if it was a total career bust, somehow I'd manage to land on my feet.
You know, I have a feeling you would have, but you don't sound like the kind of person who doesn't succeed.
And indeed, you did succeed.
Now, as for you and him, how did he sell that to you?
Because 1970, when all of this was happening for you, you know, we were still going to the moon, weren't we?
We didn't stop going to the moon until 1972.
We weren't really thinking about, I'm talking about we, the public, were not really thinking about Mars.
No, we really weren't.
Well, we had had, at the time we had, almost nobody, nobody knew almost, almost nothing was known about Mars.
We'd had three flybys.
We'd had Mariner 4 and Mariner 6 and 7.
And all it showed was a landscape that was full of craters.
And we knew that there was a north and south polar ice cap of dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide.
But nobody knew much of anything else about Mars at that time.
And there was absolutely nothing from those flybys that was suggestive of life on the planet.
So I'm actually amazed that Congress funded it as a biological mission.
Why do you think then?
I'm sorry to jump in here, but why do you think there was that interest in Mars?
Well, I think, I mean, there's always been speculation about whether or not there was life on Mars.
Percival Lowell back in the late 1800s wrote a book on Mars, and he described all these wonderful canals.
And I remember hearing about those in grade school in my 1940s, that Mars had canals.
And then he wrote another book, I think it was in 1905, where he speculated that life on Mars might be even more advanced than life on Earth.
And then there was another book that was written called War of the Worlds, and that was aired as an actual event in 1938.
And people called the radio station asking if we were really being invaded by Martians.
Yep, that was Orson Welles, wasn't it?
Yes, it was.
And so there's always been speculation about life on Mars, and there was curiosity.
Now, how NASA succeeded in selling that to Congress is something I'd love to know, because, like I say, there was nothing from the flybys indicative of life on Mars.
But somehow or another, Congress funded it as a biological mission in 1970, and Gildavin's experiment was chosen as one of the life detection tests that would be sent.
Now, mind you, these are the only life detection tests that have ever been sent to Mars.
And that is the astonishing story that we're about to tell.
I have no idea that we were even contemplating such things.
Let's just contextualize it.
Let's get the climate of the time, though.
Were there people, as there are now, suggesting or thinking about or theorizing about the possibility of colonizing Mars?
Were some people in that kind of, in that space, literally, in those days?
Was that a thought?
I don't know if we were thinking about colonizing Mars, but I worked on several projects that were related to the labeled release experiment.
And one of them is I spent a half a year for NASA looking into what people thought about return Mars sample missions.
They were certainly contemplating rover missions back then, and they were contemplating bringing back samples and what the implications of it were.
And I spent considerable amount of time thinking about those problems.
I can't say that anybody thought about colonizing Mars at that time, but they were certainly thinking about going up there and getting samples and bringing them back.
And this would have been in the 70s, the early 70s.
So the question that was framed for the people making the decision about handing out the money for this, Gil Levin must have been, as you say, he must have put together a quite remarkable case.
What was he telling him, telling them rather, that he and you could do?
What was he promising?
Well, he had designed this labeled release experiment that could detect very low levels of metabolism in soil.
The experiment sought microorganisms in soil that would metabolize organic compounds and evolve carbon dioxide.
And it was a very sensitive test.
He had, even at the time, he had conducted studies on soils from all over the world, and he'd never found a sterile soil.
And he had even looked at low-population soils, such as those from Antarctica, and found they could detect as few as 30 colonies.
So it was a very sensitive test, and a very good one that could be sent to Mars looking for microbial metabolism.
So he was very much ahead of his time then.
If we think about recent years, of course, a lot of people have talked about discovering extremophiles, creatures that can survive in boiling hot atmospheres, way down beneath the crust of the Earth, in freezing cold temperatures.
I didn't realize people were thinking along those lines, though, way back in 1970.
Or maybe Gil was just so far ahead of his time.
Well, he's actually a sanitary engineer, and he had developed this test as a means of detecting whether or not water supplies were contaminated.
And I believe he met some people from NASA, and he became enamored with the fact that this same test might be useful for detecting life on another planet because of its sensitivity.
It wasn't developed for that purpose originally.
It was developed, the test was originally developed as a means of testing for the purity of water.
So as you said a little while ago, the motivation, part of the motivation for him to want to do this was the discovery that it was possible for life to exist in places that it is very, we would have thought it was almost impossible for life to exist.
So, you know, it's a bit of a leap, isn't it, though, to extrapolate from there that if maybe life can exist under the frozen Arctic somewhere, then maybe it might exist on Mars.
That's a bit of a leap.
You have to be quite a visionary to make that step.
I think so.
I will say this for Gil.
He's very much of an idea man.
He comes up with all kinds of fascinating, unusual ideas.
Some of them are really far out and some of them are right on.
And we used to have a lot of fun kicking around some of these ideas.
Do you think there are people like that in space science now?
Oh, I'm sure there are.
All right.
You said that the story of the way the mission was put together and the way that the actual sending of the probe up there, the payload up there, was a fascinating story.
So let's start unfolding that story then.
How did it all begin?
Well, by the time Gil hired me, most of the key players were in place, and I came on just a couple of months after he started working on it for the Viking mission.
When I came on board, basically, I had a couple of technicians.
I designed all the experiments and interacted with all the engineers that were building the instrument and all, and then interacted with Gil maybe once a week to go over our plans and results and all of that.
And for the first year, basically what I was doing was refining the experiment itself to be compatible with flight hardware when it was developed.
Flight hardware became available, some of the prototypes became available after about a year, and I worked with the engineers in trying to mate the science to the hardware.
So in other words, they had the craft and you had the experiments?
Well, we had the experiment already, and TRW at Redondo Beach, California was chosen to build the instrument.
And the instrument requirements were that there were four life detection experiments originally selected.
One was eliminated further downstream, and that's a separate chapter in the book I've written.
But it had to be contained in one cubic foot and weighing no more than 22 pounds.
God.
I assume that's an awful lot of science to cram into a space like that.
Especially in 1970.
You have to remember in 1970s, we didn't have PCs yet.
We didn't even have fax machines.
So how did you overcome those challenges then?
I mean, just the idea of this thing being able to communicate is a headache in itself.
Well, yes.
But you clearly believed it could all be done.
So what was it?
Oh, there was never a doubt in my mind that it could be done.
But let me tell you something.
It wasn't very easy.
There was one problem after another, one crisis, one challenge after another, all the way through the development of this thing.
Did it ever look as if the funding might be polled trip?
Yes.
As a matter of fact, when the first flight instrument was tested in 1973, I had gone out there for a six-week business trip to work with the engineers during this test, which was to last several weeks.
Well, all three experiments completely failed.
All three failed.
And I remember Jim Martin, who was the head of the entire Viking mission, I was in the meeting where he slammed his fist on the desk and said, we're going to throw biology off this mission.
Well, somebody had reminded him that Congress had funded it as a biological mission, and he couldn't do that.
He says, okay, we'll throw off the worst experiments.
But all three of them had failed, so that's all of them.
Well, The problem was nobody could figure out which were the worst ones.
So, of course, if he was talking about throwing biology off the mission, that would mean throwing you off the mission.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, I wasn't about to let that happen.
Anyway, shortly thereafter, I got a letter in the mail that said all key scientists will remain in residence until these problems are solved.
I had gone out there for a six-week business trip and never got home again for a year and a half.
That's a lot of work.
Describe to me then in a way that I, a non-scientist, could understand why these experiments were failing in the way that they did and what it was that they were attempting to do in the experimental phase.
All right.
Let me explain what the label release experiment was all about.
It was based on heterotrophic metabolism, and that's just a fancy word for saying animal-like metabolism, where soil microorganisms are fed organic substrates and they metabolize them, and the end product of the metabolism is carbon dioxide.
We all eat organic compounds, and we exhale carbon dioxide, right?
So that's the principle of the experiment.
Now, if you take those organic substrates and label them with radioactive carbon, then the end product will be radioactive carbon dioxide.
So all you need to do is add a liquid nutrient containing those radioactive organics.
You add that on top of the soil, and you put a head Geiger counter or some sort of a counting mechanism over the headspace of the soil, and you monitor it for the evolution of radioactive gas.
Right, so that will be if you're on Mars, which is an awful long way away, and you can't send a lot of data back, that radioactive trace is going to be the thing that rings the alarm bell for you.
Yes, but that's not the entire experiment.
What you have to do then is take a duplicate sample of the same soil and heat sterilize it, cool it down, and then add the nutrient.
And if there's no evolution of radioactive gas, then that means that the first experiment that was not heat sterilized, that evolved a lot of radioactive gas, that it was due to the presence of microorganisms, and that the heat sterilization killed the microorganisms so that there was then no metabolism.
Is that clear?
It is.
It is.
You explained it very well.
So this is pretty, I mean, for its time, this is pretty groundbreaking stuff.
How do you devise something that has to be mechanical that will actually do those things without the attendance of a human operative so far away from Earth?
It's one thing to do this experiment in the lab, but it's another thing to do it on a planet millions of miles away in a hostile environment.
And my book has diagrams of how this instrument worked.
And as you can imagine, you had to have a test cell with a lid on it.
Well, there was leakage around the lid.
You had to have the capability of heating the soil, and you had to have the capability of moving liquids around and moving gas around.
And that was done by having helium sources.
You had a high-pressure helium source and a low-pressure helium source.
And then you had valves in the lines so that you could open and close valves to stop or close the movement of helium or of nutrient.
So were these like, Pep, were these like pistons moving things around then, powered by the helium?
I'm sorry?
Were these like pistons moving things around powered by the helium?
Well, you're not having a piston.
What you have is you have, say, a high-pressure helium source, and so helium moving through lines is stopped by a valve.
Right, yeah.
You open the valve and helium moves to the next valve and so forth.
We sent the nutrient up in an ampoule, and it was in a glass container with a striker.
And to open the, to release the nutrient, for example, we opened the high-pressure helium to move the striker against the glass and break it.
And then we'd have the liquid nutrient, and we could use the high-pressure helium to move that through the lines.
And it was stopped in various places by valves.
Well, one of the big problems with all of this was that sometimes the valves leak and things got blocked up and it just didn't work right.
We had to come up with very clever ways of redesigning the hardware to make this experiment work.
Because if you're on Mars and something breaks down, then there's no way of fixing it.
Probably not.
The only tools you have are to reprogram the sequence of opening and closing valves and moving helium around.
Those were really your only options.
You did have the options to update the sequence of opening and closing valves.
But that was all you had.
Well, how can you design something then that you're pretty sure is going to work 99.9% of the time in an atmosphere in conditions that are not at all like Earth?
Well, let me tell you something.
You need to read by book because it's a fascinating story of how we did that.
Okay, give me a clue.
Well, I just sort of did.
But the way that you were able to get it to be as reliable and as dependable as the people who were funding that project would have required.
Well, it was not easy.
And as a matter of fact, we had tests in three separate flight instruments.
And the first one was in the fall of 1973, and everything failed.
The next test was in the spring, early spring of 19, it would have been 1975.
And again, our experiment failed.
And the last chance we had was in April or May of 1975.
That was the last flight instrument we tested.
And that was a success.
Amazingly, that was a success.
And that success was happening at the same time the flight instruments were being delivered down to the Cape.
Boy, so you took it down to the wire.
You took it right down to the wire then.
Right down to the wire.
And let me tell you something.
During that time, for about a three-year period, I worked seven days a week, about 15 to 16 hours a day on this experiment.
And it was very close.
To run one experiment in this, in the test, we had a TSM, a test standards module.
It was not quite like a flight instrument, but all the flight components were there.
We had to run it manually.
All the valves had to be switched on and off manually.
You'd sit there with a clock, and everything was timed, and you'd go through the sequence manually.
And it took, we would put a soil in this instrument, and then we would evacuate the whole thing down to Mars atmospheric conditions, which took about a day, because Mars is almost at a vacuum.
It took about a day, and then it would take a day or two to run an experiment, and then it would take another day to clean the whole thing up.
So we would get one run every four days or so.
We had to keep this thing running 24-7 in order to get the data.
And all the time the clock is ticking down on you.
It's ticking down.
Well, let me tell you, when the Viking got to Mars, I was not at all convinced that the thing would work.
Not at all.
And the biggest surprise to me was when our first data came back, and not only was the instrument working, which you could tell from the data, but we had a positive response.
It was probably the biggest surprise of my life.
Sounds fantastic.
Now, look, let's wind back slightly from that point.
And just to ask, you know, you had the job of making the experiments work, which we heard they did.
Yes.
But the guys at NASA, the ones that you were liaising with, they had the job of propelling those experiments up to Mars.
How did you get on with them?
Did they understand what you were about?
Well, it's an amazing thing.
When that crisis happened in 1973, at first it seemed like everybody was working against everybody else.
Martin Marietta descended on TRW, NASA personnel ascended on TRW, and in fact they took over the whole management of the biology experiment.
And everybody was trying hard, but there was competition because if they were going to throw off two of the three experiments, nobody wanted their experiments thrown off.
But the amazing thing is that gradually everybody learned to work together.
And within about a month, I became aware that I was part of this huge scientific group that was all pulling together to get this thing up to Mars.
So it sounds to me as if you were every bit as much of a family as we are always led to believe the people at Apollo were.
Well, I certainly felt that with all the players on the biology instrument.
And it was a very, very large group, included NASA scientists, Martin Marietta personnel, TRW engineers and scientists, plus all the individual scientists from the different experiments.
And I just had this amazing feeling of this huge group working together, pulling together.
I've never felt that since with anything I've ever worked on.
All these years on, I can hear the excitement in your voice when you talk about this.
What kind of coverage, Pat, did you get from the media then?
Because we've got to remember that this is young people listening to this now, they will be used to a world with the internet and instant communication and all that stuff.
Now, back in those days, we both know that there were some television channels, more in the states than in the UK, but not as many as there are now, not nearly as many.
There were magazines.
There was no internet.
There were newspapers, some less serious, some more serious.
What kind of coverage were you getting?
Well, the label release experiment got a lot of coverage.
And I certainly gave a lot of interviews to various newspapers, as did Gil, Gil Levin.
And I mean, we certainly had, I mean, it was a very exciting time.
We had press conferences every day.
Wow.
And did you feel the weight of expectation on your shoulders?
Well, that wasn't my primary goal.
My primary goal was running this experiment.
Okay.
All right.
But obviously you wanted it to work.
Well, sure.
And the data came in daily, and I was there to receive the data and to analyze it and run it through computer programs.
Well, that's another interesting thing.
We really didn't have PCs at that time, but Martin Marietta had a genius programmer who designed programs for me to analyze that data.
I worked with him and told him what we needed, and he designed programs.
And I actually, for this mission, I would sit down at a computer terminal, just like a PC, and had a printer there.
And it was all custom-made for you.
All custom-made, where I could pull up the data that I needed and manipulate it in any way I wanted to.
And then I could have it print out right next to me.
That was extremely exciting.
I really enjoyed doing that.
Talk to me about the launch and the actual flight to Mars.
You know, what was that like?
Well, the launch.
The launch was in 1975, August, the first launch.
There were two launches, of course.
And the first launch was in August, and I had VIP passes to it.
And I invited my parents down from upstate New York, and we all were there for the launch.
And you know what?
One hour before launch, it was postponed.
Oh, no.
And I thought, well, that's typical of Viking.
Nothing works right the first time.
Well, it did launch 10 days later, and it was a successful launch.
And then the second one, I could no longer be there.
Unfortunately, I missed the launch.
I couldn't sit around for 10 days.
And the actual journey and then the arrival at Mars and the landing on Mars, of course, not as easy to monitor in those days as it would be today.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I didn't really think much about it.
It was on the way, and I was involved in using the instrument that we had to obtain data that might be useful in interpreting whatever we got from Mars if we had a successful mission.
And I was also very much involved in flight team training.
I was part of a team that we would develop scenarios.
What would we do if?
Because during the mission, of course, we wouldn't have time to develop.
We wouldn't have much time to develop something if we had to turn around and resequence the lander.
So what kind of workarounds did you come up with?
Oh, I really can't remember those workarounds.
All right, but maybe that was a bad question.
Maybe I should have asked, what kind of problems were you trying to anticipate?
Well, what would we do if we thought maybe we didn't get a soil sample?
What if we thought we didn't get a nutrient injection?
Something went wrong and it didn't inject?
Well, we went through all those scenarios and what we might, and various options that might be open to us, but we never had to use those because everything worked.
That was the biggest surprise of my life that everything on the label release experiment worked.
And when, presumably, there would have been a point at which you are anticipating and expecting the data to come through, and you're all standing there or sitting there waiting for that to happen.
What was that like, that period just before the data starts to arrive?
Well, that was quite a night.
That was on SAL 10.
We had injected our nutrient onto the soil, and the first data dump would come back for the first, I think it was the first nine hours of data, would come back the evening of, I believe it was July 30th, 1976.
And I sat down at the computer.
It was 7.30 at night.
And I sat down and I went through all the keystrokes to bring up the data.
And I was surrounded by many of the members of the biology team.
And they were all waiting to see what's going to happen.
And I pressed a button.
And on the printer, it printed the X and the Y axis.
And it printed the name of the database and all of that.
And then in a flash, the data points flashed out.
And it was an obvious positive response.
Well, that was pretty exciting.
And that particular printout, I took it off the printer, and Gil wrote across the top, July 30th, 1976, and then he wrote the word tonight, referring to the popular song at the time, It All Began Tonight.
And everybody signed that printout, and a copy of that printout is in my book.
Talk to me about what it was like when Gil discovered and you discovered what you believed was the basis of life on Mars.
Well, this was a positive response.
And we called in the whole biology team that night, and we talked about it.
But of course, remember I said you had to confirm a positive response with a heat sterilized response.
And that would be the next sequence that was performed.
And it would be several days downstream before we could perform that.
So you were 50% of the way there.
We're 50% of the way there.
But when we performed the control, which was preheating the soil to 160 degrees centigrade for three hours, that response was clearly negative.
And that's when the fun really began.
Because the first two cycles, the active cycle and the control cycle, those two cycles together met the pre-mission criteria for a positive response on Mars.
Well, everybody jumped on the bandwagon and suddenly came up with all kinds of hypotheses to explain it non-biologically.
Right, so they were trying to naysay it.
Everybody was going to nay.
Well, I wasn't terribly convinced myself.
And especially in light of all these non-biological hypotheses that suddenly came about, none of which had been ever been discussed before the mission.
But you must have had, somewhere in your heart, the inkling of the idea that if what we are seeing turns out to be verified and turns out to be correct, then this is life.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But the best we could say at the time was that the results were consistent with the life Response.
Right.
I've got a quote here from Gil Levin.
Let me just go down into the copy here.
It says, quote, there is substantial and circumstantial evidence for extant microbial life on Mars.
I don't know at what point he made that statement, but that's one hell of a statement.
I know.
It wasn't until about in the 1990s that he finally came out and said he believed that the experiment had, in fact, detected life.
And that was based on the fact that nobody had been able to replicate the data non-biologically.
And also, we were beginning to find some evidence of possible traces of water on Mars.
I didn't agree with him at first.
I wanted more proof, but over the years, over the next five years or so, as more and more evidence came that there was water on Mars, I began to agree with him.
And I think today, I think there's a very, very good chance that these indeed are life responses.
What were those 15 years or so like, though, in between having discovered what you discovered and then that period of not being particularly sure?
And then Gil comes out and says, I think actually, yes, it looks like there is life.
You know, 15 years is a hell of a long time.
Well, you know, when the Viking mission turned out negative, all the money went out of space research.
Reagan came in and politics changed, and there were no missions to Mars after that.
The next mission to Mars wasn't until the late 1990s.
So we went 20 years without doing anything with Mars.
Results sort of trickled in, but they were all from Earth-based telescope.
You know, I still get the chills when I have to say that it's 2020.
I still can't believe that it's 2020, Pat.
I don't know how you feel about that.
But as we look at it through the prism of 2020, say to me very clearly what it is you believe then that this mission, this experiment, this series of experiments, discovered.
What I think I believe the labeled release detected, the life detection experiment detected microbial life on Mars.
And how come nothing else since has?
They've never sent another life detection experiment.
What they have sent, everything that's been sent so far has been looking for habitat, whether or not there are organic compounds and whether or not there's water.
Now those were the, there were three main reasons why the labeled release experiment was not accepted as indicative of life.
And the first one was that the other two life detection experiments were both negative.
Well that wasn't too surprising because they were both sought for different kinds of life.
One of them sought photosynthetic life and the other one sought various chemotrophic life and looked for gas evolution, whether or not, and it would have detected any gas that changed over time, whether or not it was involved in a life response.
But both of those experiments were negative for microbial life.
The second reason was that the GCMS experiment did not detect any organic compounds.
Well, today, organic compounds have been detected on Mars, and there may be good reasons why the GCMS experiment didn't detect anything, namely that perchlorates now have been found in the soil, and if the soil was heated in the presence of perchlorates, it may have destroyed any organics that were there before they could be detected.
So it was a matter of methodology.
Yeah.
And also, more and more water, more and more evidence of water has been found on Mars.
Not much, not much, but perhaps enough to support life.
And extremophiles that you mentioned earlier have been found that could probably exist on Mars.
And all of those things point to the fact that the LR certainly could very well have been positive.
And of course, the discovery of what we Brits call methane.
Of what?
Methane.
Methane.
Oh, methane, yes.
The discovery of methane is really very exciting.
The reason methane, of course, is indicative of life is that it has a very short half-life in the atmosphere.
So the fact that it's found means it's constantly replenished.
And on Earth, it's replenished from methane bacteria.
That's the main source of methane in Earth's atmosphere.
And of course, everybody just jumps on that when they find methane on Mars.
Of course, methane does come from things like volcanic action, but there hasn't been any volcanic action recently on Mars.
And the other exciting thing about the methane is that they followed it over three seasons and found that it's cyclical.
And nobody can explain that.
And of course, it certainly suggests biology.
Well, I mean, if you have a cycle, you said it was cyclical.
If you have a cycle, well, that's like growing things.
Things grow in a cycle.
That's right.
So it's a big mystery, and it's a very exciting one.
What do you think of people who suggest that there may have been a civilization on Mars a long, long time ago, perhaps predating us?
Well, I mean, all you have to do is look at the pictures.
I don't see any evidence for it.
Well, there are people who say, I mean, for example, Richard C. Hoagland, who we have on this show periodically, who say, you know, look at some of the fragments.
There's regular geometry there and all that kind of stuff.
Do you think that people are seeing what they want to see?
Well, I don't think there's any really good evidence for a past civilization.
Okay.
Now, as far as life Is concerned.
How did it get there?
Well, one theory, of course, is that millions of years ago, maybe billions of years ago, Mars was more like early Earth, and the conditions then would have been more conducive to the formation of life.
And that's certainly one possibility.
And the ExoMars mission going up there this summer will drill down and look for ancient life to see if they can find any biosignatures that maybe it did evolve.
And that's, so stay tuned.
I think that's interesting.
I think so.
The other possibility is panspermia.
Maybe it evolved here, and material has been exchanging between Earth and Mars for years and millions of years.
And maybe somehow or another, microorganisms for Earth were somehow transported by meteorites or something to Mars.
And maybe that's another way it could have formed on Mars, or vice versa.
All fascinating, all exciting.
If we discover what you suspect already, that there is a form of life, or maybe forms of life on Mars, how do we manage that news, Pat?
I wonder.
I wonder, and I can't help but think that, I mean, that's the reason everybody is, that NASA and all is so cautious, I think, about trying to say anything that there is life on Mars.
I think it could cause some very interesting debates.
Well, it would cause us to question an awful lot of things down here.
Yeah, like religion and everything else.
Yeah, as is often said.
But, you know, that information would have to be put out to the public in some form.
And I guess plans must be made.
Did you give any consideration to that in 1976?
In 1976, I personally was trying to design an experiment that would work on Mars and give us an answer.
And there really wasn't room in my mind for speculations that didn't have an answer.
I mean, when you're talking about how it might affect religion or anything else, there just wasn't room in my mind for that sort of thinking.
How did the media, now we talked about the media before, how did the media reflect the outcome of your experiment then?
What did they say?
Did they say inconclusive?
Did they say this is exciting and hopeful, but we need to do more research?
How was it presented?
Well, there are many newspapers.
They were all different, were they?
Nothing was exactly the same.
Everybody had ideas about it.
How did you come out of it feeling?
How did I come out of it?
Yeah.
Well, just as I've told you, I mean...
Because you had to wait a period for more verification, for more evidence.
So you had to get on with your life.
I had to get on with my life, and as all the money went out of space research, I had to find another job.
So I moved on, and I moved into an administrative position at the National Institutes of Health, where I retired in 2001.
Did you stop?
But I never stopped working on Mars.
Gil and I wrote a lot of proposals together, and we wrote a lot of papers together over those years.
And we never let the label release experiment die.
We tried as best we could to keep it in the forefront.
And I think it's extremely important even today to keep it in the forefront.
It's certainly a possibility that we really did discover life on Mars.
And I think we need to think twice before we start bringing return Mars samples back here.
Really?
Why would that be in case we're not sure of what we're bringing back?
Yeah, I want to make sure we're not bringing back alien life or maybe something that might contaminate us in ways that we don't understand.
That's exactly right.
Do you think anybody would be silly enough to do...
I think they are talking about bringing...
They certainly are.
...soil samples back, yeah.
There are a lot of people who are convinced that the label release experiment was negative and that there is no extant life now on Mars.
And so they're just going to bring samples back.
Well, I think they need to rethink that.
And I make that point.
I've got a chapter on that point in my book at the end of my book.
So those people are pretty much convinced that it's dead up there and it's quite safe to bring back samples.
And you're trying to warn them, be careful what you bring back because you don't know what it's got inside it.
That's exactly right.
Boy.
And how are you going to get that message across if the scientific establishment sees it one way, and I mean, you're used to this, and you see it another, how is that gap ever bridged?
I don't know.
The best I can do is bring it to people's attention.
I'm 84 years old.
I'm not an active scientist anymore other than through writing.
I'm not in the laboratory.
And it's certainly publicized in my book, and my book is getting wide publicity.
And I'm glad about that.
Do you feel that in the years that followed what you did, that the scientific establishment let you down by not continuing your work?
Well, yes, I think it's, oh, it's a shame that it was never followed up.
As a scientist, and you have an exciting result, you immediately follow it through.
And I was certainly working on what we would do on a follow-on Viking mission at the time.
But like I say, Reagan came in and all the money went out of space research and there was no follow-up.
And there's been no follow-up since.
And I think that's just a shame.
We had an exciting result.
We had good follow-on experiments to prove or disprove it.
And nothing ever came of that.
If you'd had the chance, what would have been the next thing you'd have done?
Well, one of the obvious experiments to be done, we had seven different organic substrates in our nutrient.
And the obvious thing would have been to test them all individually.
Now, of those seven, alanine has two different forms, a D and an L. And both of them were included in our nutrient that was sent to Mars.
By separating those, you could actually have determined whether or not there was a life response.
The reason is that on Earth, the L form of amino acids is incorporated into proteins and not the D form.
So on Mars, if there was preferential utilization of one form over the other, that would be almost proof positive that there was life on Mars.
Boy, so you really needed to do that next experiment.
We wanted to do that next experiment, and we have written proposal after proposal after proposal to try and do it.
Do you think that we should send people to Mars?
Should we be living there?
Well, what I think doesn't really make much difference.
Excuse me, I think it's an exciting possibility, and I don't think there's going to be any way to stop it because I think human curiosity is going to follow through on anything that we're capable of doing.
But I think you may recall the book The Martian, which was a very exciting, well-written book.
And a wonderful movie.
And a wonderful movie, too.
I think all the difficulties that are put forth in the Martian are just a drop in the bucket as to what they'll encounter when they really do decide to go up there and try to colonize Mars.
But I'm sure it'll happen eventually.
What about those people who suggest that we ought to terraform Mars, to do things to it, some of them very dramatic, to make it more like here?
Well, I don't know how to answer that.
Do you think we should or we shouldn't?
Well, I think if we're going to have to, if we're going to try to colonize the place, it's so hostile to humans.
I mean, you've got to figure out how we're going to get water, how we're going to get oxygen, and then dealing with the cold and the atmospheric pressures.
I mean, if we're going to try to colonize Mars, we've really got to change the planet.
What about those people who think and suggest, and I know we touched on this before, with the idea that some people think there are remnants of buildings and stuff like that on Mars, the idea that we might have existed a very, very, very, very long time ago on Mars and we actually came here from there?
I think it's ridiculous.
I don't see any evidence for it at all.
So you think we're going in one direction?
We're going to go there.
That is an unstoppable tide.
And we just have to be mindful and careful about the way that we do it.
Yes, if Congress decides that we're not going to go, however, it's not going to happen because Congress holds the first strings.
It's all about politics.
It's all about money.
Maybe we need a visionary character like Kennedy again, who stood there as we both remember in the 1960s and said, we're going to send a man to the moon and bring him back again.
Maybe we need that kind of vision.
Yes, maybe.
And I remember that.
I watched that on television, that first landing.
Well, listen, I've obviously seen the newsreel footage and YouTube clips of all of that.
What did it feel like to be part of that?
Because you were a young lady in that period, involved in science.
How did you feel then?
Did you feel energized by the spirit of the time?
Oh, of course.
I thought that was just so exciting.
I mean, I grew up thinking the moon was green cheese.
And there was a man in the moon if you looked up there.
When you look at the world in 2020 and the way that we do science now and the way that we treat our environment now and the kind of things we're trying to do, do you think that all the progress we've made is, you know, progress is always a good thing, or do you think that we're making mistakes?
I think we're making big mistakes in terms of polluting our planet.
I think we're beginning to recognize that.
I hope it's in time.
Uh-huh.
So you're optimistic that we might be able to correct it if we take the steps that we need to.
Well, I would like to hope we can do that.
If not, it's a catastrophe.
You and I have shared a remarkable story, and I hope I've begun to do it some justice here.
Is there anything that I should have asked you or anything that we should have said?
Yes, I want to talk about my book.
All right, talk about your book.
My book is, the name of my book is To Mars with Love, and it tells the story in detail.
It tells about the crises and the challenges of the label release experiment and also all the humor.
And I wrote it for the educated layperson, so it's an easy read, and it's a fun read.
And I've got photographs, I've got 91 figures and photographs in there of all the key players that were on the flight team.
I've got a section on the memorabilia and letters that were written in.
And I go through the experiment in detail.
And at the same time as this experiment, as I was working on the label release experiment, I was also very much involved with the equestrian world.
And sometimes the interaction between The equestrian world and the Viking mission was very funny.
Really?
And those stories are also included in my book.
And when you say the equestrian world, you mean you were involved in horses?
I was involved in fox hunting.
Okay, were you?
You know how controversial that is here.
Oh, I do.
But we did not kill the fox, by the way.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that is, they say, is a whole can of worms.
But the book sounds remarkable.
Now, you said about Gil Levin, the man who came up with this idea, the man who you clearly still have great regard for because of the difference he made to your life.
We're still in contact.
Great.
He was a man who had a sense of humor and wanted to make it fun.
Yes.
And you said there were many amusing incidents.
Can you recall one that you could leave us with?
Not necessarily with Gil.
maybe with the team?
I'd rather leave that to my readers.
We've got to get the book.
Well, I totally understand that.
Now, Pat.
But I'd like to say that the book can be purchased by going to my website, which is https, www.tomarswithlove.com.
That's tomarswithlove.com.
That's the name of the book, and also the name of the website.
Now, Pat, I know that you've had your own personal mountains to climb one way and another in recent years.
You know, how are things with you?
Well, I'm doing just fine.
Good.
Well, long may you continue so to do, Pat.
Your enthusiasm shines through.
And I hope that I'm 50% as amazing as you when I get to 84.
And thank you very much for giving me time today.
Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about it.
Take care.
Please take care and God bless you.
Well, thank you and God bless you too.
Well, as we say in Liverpool, we certainly did when I was a kid.
That was a story and a half.
Dr. Patricia Ann Stratt.
So pleased we had her on and thanks to Jay for emailing me about her and for helping me to get in touch with her.
If you have any suggestions for shows, you know what to do.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can send me an email through there.
If you'd like to leave a donation for the show, then you can do that too.
We have more great guests coming up in the pipeline here on The Unexplained as we cruise through 2020.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am definitely in London.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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