SINCE last month鈥檚 Presidential election, if you ask senior government
officials whether they are planning to resign and they say no, it also means one
of three things. (1) they aren鈥檛 planning to resign; (2) they are planning to
resign, but aren鈥檛 about to tell you鈥攁t least not yet; or (3) they
understood the question OK, and now they are nervous that you have heard the
White House is dumping them before they did.
President Clinton has been asking a number of senior officials to look for
other work as he gets ready to begin his second term of office, but at least in
the case of Food and Drug Administration chief David Kessler last month, (2)
seemed to be the correct answer. During the third week in November the rumour
was that the controversial Kessler would be stepping down. Although Kessler has
been popular with health activists for attempting to regulate cigarettes and
forestall efforts to gut the FDA鈥檚 regulatory power, he鈥檚 made many powerful
enemies and no one was surprised to hear that Kessler was calling it quits.
Callers to his office, however, were assured that rumours of his demise were
greatly exaggerated. 鈥淗e鈥檚 here for the long haul,鈥� said a spokesman. In
Washington, 鈥渓ong鈥� is a relative term. The next week, on 25 November, Kessler
announced he was stepping down. White House officials insisted that the decision
was Kessler鈥檚. That still makes (3) a possibility.
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IT鈥橲 BEEN a while since NASA had whole new worlds to conquer. Since the last
man stepped off the Moon, the space agency has focused mostly on new
machines鈥攖he space shuttle, the Hubble Space Telescope and the space
station. Now NASA has the bit between its teeth again, and it tastes like gold.
Life on Mars鈥攐r at least the leavings of life, found on a Martian
meteorite extracted from Antarctic ice. Very, very tiny forms of life, they
would have to have been, and rudimentary indeed. But signs of life, on another
planet.
So NASA now has plans to launch a pair of spacecraft for Mars every 26 months
through to the year 2005. A Mars mapping satellite was launched last week. It
was planned long before the pregnant meteorite made the headlines, but its
mission has taken on far more lustre now.
That golden bit may tarnish, however. NASA scientists have tried to still
their beating hearts鈥攖hey even invited a doubter to the press conference
announcing the 鈥渕aybe life鈥� meteorite鈥攂ut it鈥檚 clear they are in that
ticklish position of wanting this so badly they can taste it. Already, the
Martian meteorite findings have prompted severe scepticism from scientists
outside the NASA fold. The methods used to identify the signs of life are new
and relatively untested, and the evidence itself is highly inferential.
No one is likely to be able to prove that the meteorite markings are fossils,
only that they aren鈥檛. Real proof will have to come from rocks brought back from
Mars. That, if it ever happens, is a long way off, and Congress has a short
attention span. The country shrugged when scientists wanted to search the
heavens for electromagnetic signals of intelligent life. It may well shrug again
if the next load of rocks that NASA brings back doesn鈥檛 settle the big
question.
journalists flocked to a news conference at the Pentagon on Tuesday 3
December to hear Defense Department scientists describe how a tiny spacecraft
called Clementine, built from Star Wars spare parts, had helped scientists on
Earth detect ice in craters at the lunar south pole.
The curious thing about the story is that most journalists had been told
about it more than a week earlier. The news was buried at the bottom of a list
of research articles scheduled to appear in the 29 November edition of
Science. The list, sent to journalists about a week before the journal鈥檚
publication date, highlights what the editors of Science think are the
most important articles in that week鈥檚 issue. Journalists are encouraged to
prepare articles that can be published or broadcast to coincide with the
publication date of the journal.
The 鈥渢ip-sheet鈥�, as it is known, gave no hint of the possible news value of
the Pentagon鈥檚 research. Oh, sure, the title and abstract for the article were
there, but 鈥淭he Clementine Bistatic Radar Experiment鈥�, is hardly the world鈥檚
sexiest title. And the abstract of the paper primarily discussed curious
differences in the behaviour of radar waves bounced off the north and south
lunar poles. An astute reader who slogged through to the end of the abstract
might have raised an eyebrow at the concluding sentence: 鈥淎 probable explanation
for these differences is the presence of low-loss volume scatterers, such as
water ice, in the permanently shadowed region at the south pole.鈥� Apparently, no
one in the news media got that far.