D2 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
When Penelope Boston was a
student at the University of
Colorado in the 1980s, she
wanted to create a miniature
Mars and see how some living
things fared on it.
Lacking funds, she amassed parts from
labs around campus and bootstrapped a ba-
sic version of what scientists sometimes
call a Mars Jar: a sealed container whose
insides resemble the red planet, used to test
the survival of biological beings. Ms. Boston
(now Dr. Boston) had read about Carl Sa-
gan’s use of Mars Jars and had assumed, as
many did, that he’d invented them.
Into her jar, she placed microbes and
radishes, pumped down the pressure and
made the air mixture Martian, fashioning a
fake fourth planet from the sun populated
by squirming organisms and vegetables.
“It’s a lot like gardening,” she joked.
Mars has long been a repository for such
extraterrestrial imaginings. While robotic
Mars missions investigate soil composition,
drill into rocks and peer into the atmos-
phere, the bedrock beneath those research
questions is biological: Was the planet hab-
itable? Was there — could there now be —
life? Like missions past, three new missions
launching this summer — NASA’s Perse-
verance, the United Arab Emirates’ Hope
and China’s Tianwen-1 — will search for
such biological bread crumbs, a line of work
informed by the Mars Jars of Earth.
Dr. Boston has gone on to much more so-
phisticated simulations in her work, and
was appointed director of NASA’s Astrobiol-
ogy Institute in 2016. But it wasn’t until re-
cently that she learned the true origin of the
containers that were so important to herown work — roots that some researchers
say affect astrobiology’s present, as well as
its future growth.
In 2018, a young scholar, Jordan Bimm,
visited her NASA office. He was working on
a history of Mars Jars, and he wanted to
show her a one-minute film clip from 1958.
Pushing play later, Dr. Boston saw a mid-
century Air Force scientist, dressed in a ca-
nonical white lab coat, hooking hoses into a
glass container, fiddling with feeds, twisting
knobs.
“MARS JARS,” the film’s clapperboard
said.
A man named Dr. Hubertus Strughold, a
professor of space medicine at the Air
Force’s School of Aviation Medicine, over-
saw the mini-movie’s experiments. And
he’d done them years before Sagan popular-
ized the jars, in print and on the “Cosmos”
series on television. This astrobiology tech-
nique didn’t begin with academic scientists,
Dr. Boston realized: It began with airmen.
“That was edifying,” she said. “The mili-
tary did it first.”
That military origin still affects Mars re-
search, one of a variety of social issues that
researchers working in astrobiology are
grappling with. Just as nuclear power has
had to reckon with its origins in weaponry,
and as medicine has had to face the fact that
it’s benefited from the treatment of war
wounds, some scholars say that remember-
ing the military mind-set in astrobiology’s
early years research could help inform, and
perhaps alter, its future.A Largely Forgotten Past
Dr. Bimm, a postdoctoral researcher at
Princeton University, studies the Cold War-
riors who researched survival in the harsh
environment of space. It’s what led him to
the Mars Jars: He was diving into Dr.
Strughold’s work on astronaut physiology
and aviation medicine in the United States
— work he had started in Nazi Germany for
the Luftwaffe, and which was tangled up in
inhumane experiments.
Dr. Strughold didn’t do these experi-
ments himself, and he wasn’t a member of
the Nazi party. But on his watch, re-
searchers locked prisoners at the Dachau
concentration camp in low-pressure cham-
bers, to show what might happen to fliers at
high altitude, and dressed them in fighter-
pilot uniforms and submerged them in
freezing water.
“You don’t get to hold that job for 10 years
unless you are 100 percent in lock step with
the leadership,” Dr. Bimm said.
Some scientists have responded to his
past in Nazi Germany: The Space MedicineAssociation, beginning in 1963, bestowed
the annual Strughold Award on accom-
plished researchers, but in 2013, after a Wall
Street Journal article about Dr. Strughold’s
connections to inhumane research and a
vote from its membership, the organization
retired the prize.
After World War II, Dr. Strughold arrived
in America as part of the secretive Opera-
tion Paperclip, which swept German scien-
tists to the United States. Wernher von
Braun, who had overseen the Nazi V-2
rocket and later became the architect of
NASA’s Saturn V rocket, also came to North
America through this program, and the two
interacted at space conferences.
One day, Dr. Bimm stumbled onto an ob-
scure 1950s report that mentioned Mars
Jars. “I was like, ‘Wait a second, this is earli-
er than when people were supposed to be
doing this sort of research,’ ” he said. Since
then, he’s been chronicling Dr. Strughold’s
Mars research, a past that astrobiology it-
self has largely forgotten.
A few years after Dr. Strughold started
working with the Air Force, he published
“Life on Mars in View of Physiological Prin-
ciples.” Two years later, in 1953, he wrote
“The Green and Red Planet,” coining the
term “astrobiology” and considering
whether a low-pressure chamber — a
shrunken version of those in his aviation ex-
periments — could mimic Mars.
It was a wild idea, and afraid of his col-
leagues’ judgment, he began a simple ver-
sion of the experiment at home. He pur-
chased jars and a thermometer, gathered
lava and lichens. He put the material and
the plants in the jars and let them hang in
his kitchen during the day; at night, he put
them in the icebox.
Two weeks later, the lichens were still
alive.
Encouraged by the results, Dr. Strugholdshared them at the office. By 1956, more so-
phisticated versions of Mars Jars had be-
come part of the Air Force’s research
agenda. Imagining a military base on Mars,
the scientists wanted to see if hypothetical
Martian microbes might help them create a
self-sustaining ecosystem.
At the end of the trials, some life had
found a way. Certain microbes even repro-
duced. “Earth life could survive there, or life
could arise — life as we know it — and we
might encounter that life there as well,” Dr.
Bimm said, describing their conclusions.
Dr. Strughold’s work provided a vision of a
microbial Mars that persists today, and
wasn’t really popular before the jars.
A year later, Dr. Strughold hosted “Prob-
lems Common to Astronomy and Biology,”
the first-ever astrobiology symposium.
Despite these firsts, Dr. Strughold isn’t
part of most scientists’ remembrances of
astrobiology. The typical retelling involves
civilian scientists, who crafted and are char-
acters in an origin story that skips over the
military scenes.
In that story, astrobiology starts in 1957,
when Joshua Lederberg, a 1958 Nobel lau-
reate, dines with another biologist during a
lunar eclipse and discusses how the Cold
War’s arms and space races could forever
confuse the search for alien life.
Dr. Lederberg then talked about the topic
with officials at the National Academy of
Sciences and NASA, calling it not astrobiol-
ogy but exobiology.Soon enough, it became
an official field of study within NASA, and
Carl Sagan jumped aboard.
When Sagan put Mars Jars on TV and in
other mainstream media, history was re-
packaged and resealed: Exobiology began
with Dr. Lederberg and NASA, and many
seemed to believe that Mars Jars sprang
from Sagan’s mind.
Dr. Bimm doesn’t think that’s an accident.
He believes scientists attempted to erase,
or at least elide, Dr. Strughold’s work.
Audra Wolfe, an independent historian,
has detailed how Dr. Lederberg and his con-
temporaries tried to shield their astrobio-
logical efforts from the taint of military
space ambitions, positioning them as pure
science. They hoped the exobiology pro-
gram “could serve as a neutral scientific
counterpart to the hawkish satellite, mis-
sile, and manned-craft programs that
formed the technological and economic
core of the space program,” she wrote.
These scientists didn’t want to be associ-
ated with security clearances: Secret-keep-
ing was antithetical to the open nature of
science. They desired neutrality, or, at least,
the appearance and aspiration of it. In reali-
ty, Dr. Lederberg had a relationship with
Fort Detrick, where the government did bi-
ological-weapons research.
Dr. Wolfe notes that even neutrality is, of
course, a political goal. And no science, not
even the purest, exists in a vacuum.‘Dollhouses of Science’
That includes the Martian-jar science of to-
day, like the kind done by Andrew
Schuerger, an astrobiologist at the Univer-
sity of Florida.
Dr. Schuerger was once a plant patholo-
gist at Disney’s Epcot Center. But he piv-
oted to astrobiology after scientists an-
nounced, in 1996, that a Martian meteorite
might contain microscopic fossils of alien
life. By 2004, he had built his own much
more sophisticated Mars Jar, now usually
called a Mars Simulation Chamber.
With it, Dr. Schuerger has identified
about 30 bacteria that can grow in a Mars-
like state. But the conditions he and others
simulate — though not pleasant — are not
the harshest Mars has to offer, or at least not
all the harshest all at once. It’s like dropping
a person in the shadiest spot on a stiflingdesert island, with packaged food and fresh
water, and saying: “Look! They’re fine.”
Tweak those conditions — create fluctua-
tions in temperature or water, use Mars-
analog soils that also have salts inside —
and most microbes wilt. “It just takes a little
bit of stress to kick them into a nongrowth
environment or situation,” Dr. Schuerger
said. “I’d like to find out what those min-
imum thresholds are.”
It’s the same question, really, that Dr.
Strughold sought to answer.
Dr. Strughold’s jars taught him to see
Mars a certain way — and they may provide
today’s researchers a similar view. Stand-
ing over a simulation chamber, tinkering
with settings, watching small beings grow
or die, you are the god.
“When you have a Mars Jar, every place
looks like a planet you can explore and colo-
nize, and every microbe looks like some-
thing you can study, capture and maybe
use,” Dr. Bimm said.
In Dr. Boston’s view, they’re more like
“ ‘dollhouses of science,’ where we can try
out different realities on the tiny microbial
beings that we study.”
“I don’t think of myself as ‘godlike,’ ” she
said, “more like ‘childlike.’ ”The Importance of Social Questions
Understanding past and present colonialist
mind-sets, along with space exploration’s
other psychosocial facets, has long been im-
portant to Linda Billings, a communications
researcher and an adviser to NASA’s astro-
biology program. She has chronicled scien-
tists’ intermittent attempts to wake them-
selves to human-centric questions.
“Until about 10 years ago, most of the peo-
ple who were considering what we call so-
cial and conceptual issues were not well
equipped,” she said. They were physical sci-
entists playing with social questions.
That’s part of why Dr. Billings works with
the new Society for Social and Conceptual
Issues in Astrobiology: to get actual social
and conceptual experts to weigh in. One is-
sue they discuss is how humanity will react
if scientists actually find evidence of extra-
terrestrial life — on Mars or elsewhere.
“Research thus far indicates that the dis-
covery of extraterrestrial microbial life will
throw the scientific community into a tizzy
but not the global population,” she said.
Scientists may see it as Earth-shattering
information, in other words, but it may not
affect most people’s daily lives. Astrobiolo-
gists and SETI scientists — who often
search for extraterrestrial life with the as-
sumption that they are doing humanity a fa-
vor — would do well to be aware of, and
humbled by, that terrestrial context.
Another organization, the JustSpace Alli-
ance, was founded with complementary
goals, aiming to investigate questions such
as “who environments are for and what the
worth of an environment is,” said Lucianne
Walkowicz, an astronomer at the Adler
Planetarium in Chicago who formed
JustSpace in 2018 with Erika Nesvold, an
astrophysicist who is a developer for an as-
tronomy educational software company.
Space types aren’t necessarily used to
thinking about these soft ideas.
“ ‘The stars are just pure science; you
don’t have to worry about that,’ ” Dr.
Nesvold said, imitating one typical attitude.
You only need to worry about how to make a
rocket engine, decelerate a rover through
an atmosphere, polish a telescope mirror.
But that’s not true: Every exploration of
the out there comes from in here. And so it
carries as cargo the problems, positives and
past of the society that wrought it. That is
why Dr. Bimm cares where Mars Jars really
came from.
“It’s not only Mars that’s in the jar,” he
said. “We’re in there, too.”Uncovering the Tangled Roots
Of the Mars Jars Experiments
Scientists have long been trying to simulate conditions on the red planet in sealed containers filled
with organisms, but the military did it first.
From top: Dr. Hubertus
Strughold, center, with a
pressurized chamber that
was eventually used for
space medicine research, at
the U.S. Air Force School of
Aviation Medicine in the
1950s, where he began his
Mars Jars experiments; the
researcher Penelope
Boston, right, with Chris
McKay and her Mars Jars in
1980; and a contemporary
Mars Jar design at the
University of Florida.
‘When you have
a Mars Jar,
every place looks
like a planet you
can explore and
colonize, and
every microbe
looks like
something you
can study,
capture and
maybe use.’
JORDAN BIMM
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
By SARAH SCOLESA.F.M.S. HISTORY OFFICEANDREW SCHUERGER/UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDASTEVE WELCH