How did you get involved in the search for extraterrestrial life?
I was just lucky. I happened to be available at the time somebody wanted somebody with the skills I had from my research degree to work on the analysis of the Apollo lunar samples. In fact, the job had been offered to someone else who had decided that there weren't many career prospects in it, so he turned it down, it was advertised and I got it. Apollo could have been over in a few days almost for us because our role was to actually look for evidence of life on the moon, and that might sound funny now, but in those days people believed that what we saw and called merry seas were in fact dried up sea beds. So, we were going to look for sedimentary rocks, and in sedimentary rocks you find evidence of organisms that live in the water, and that's what we did. Within a few days it was apparent to us that there was nothing of any significance in the moon for that kind of research. However, we had also found out that the sun was constantly bombarding the moon with particles, of which carbon was the fourth most abundant element, so we thought there must be some carbon chemistry even if there isn't any life chemistry. So, we started doing that, and that led on to a lot of other things; analysing meteorites and developing techniques (because it's very difficult to make some of these measurements on extraterrestrial samples because you don't get very much). So, in order to get the information you want, you have to develop instruments that can get data from smaller samples than anybody else because that's the name of the game; you want to be the first to discover something. It was the fact that we developed instruments for the moon that allowed us to work on small samples of meteorites and things like diamonds. People have said that you can't destroy a diamond to get scientific evidence. So, we said "Oh well," and we destroyed a little bit, so we worked on trying to get data from tiny amounts of diamond.
