Word: lederberg
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Known as a "multivator" (for multiple evaluator), the life detector was developed by Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Stanford University's Nobel-winning geneticist, Physicist Elliott Levinthal and Electrical Engineer Lee Hundley. In its current version, which may be further miniaturized, the multivator stands just under 10 in. tall, weighs less than 2 Ibs. But despite its small size, it is more than equal to its momentous mission...
Phosphatase itself is not alive, but Lederberg reasons that if the enzyme shows up in the dust of Mars, its presence must mean that microscopic living organisms exist-or have recently existed-on the distant planet just as they do on earth. The actual identification of these creatures will have to wait for larger, more elaborate spacecraft. But in the meantime, to ensure that Mars is not contaminated by earthly microbes carried there aboard the multivator, Lederberg is working on a technique for sterilizing his life detector...
...having raised $17 million for the purpose. Sterling moved Stanford's dusty medical school from San Francisco to Palo Alto, gave it a bright young faculty as well as a major research center. Typical of the center's current work is Nobel Prizewinning Exobiologist Joshua Lederberg's effort to build a TV-microscope to land on Mars and sample possible life there. Even more conducive to Big Science at Palo Alto is Sterling's most audacious 1962 coup: a $114 million AEC contract to build a two-mile linear accelerator, which eventually will be the world...
Moon Anteater. Lederberg is working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on a no-return device that will look for traces of life on the moon. Carefully sterilized before launching to protect the moon from the earth's organisms, Lederberg's spacecraft will be a sort of mechanical anteater with a sticky tongue for licking up lunar dust and placing it under a microscope to be examined by a television camera. If the camera reports to earth that the dust contains spores that may have the power of coming to dangerous life, the first manned voyage...
...Lederberg expects his no-return lab to reach the moon about 1964; a more sophisticated package of life-seeking instruments should be landed on Mars about 1967. The worried geneticist is especially pleased to hear from the space blacksmiths that manned, two-way journeys even to the moon will be unlikely for at least a decade. By the time the first human starts home from Mars, the earth's biologists should know enough about Martian life to keep it from damaging life on the home planet...