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Friday, May 23, 2003Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in Britain, has put forward in the past the theory that disastrous influenza outbreaks and even bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as mad-cow disease) may have originated in space. In a letter to the British medical journal The Lancet, he says there is enough evidence to suggest that SARS fell to earth. Chinese authorities have reported that the seven people in the province of Guangdong who were the first to be infected with the virus had no contact with each other. Dr. Wickramasinghe says that the Chinese government has also been unable to document how a large number of SARS patients got the disease. "This leaves open the question of where the virus came from," Dr. Wickramasinghe said in an interview yesterday, adding that most microbiologists and virologists will dispute his claim that SARS fell from the sky. Although the "Cardiff Center for Astrobiology" calls forth unfortuante mental associations with the Cardiff Giant, Dr. Wickramsinghe’s letter (requires free registration) isn’t entirely wacky: We detected large quantities of viable microorganisms in samples of stratospheric air at an altitude of 41 km.1,2 We collected the samples in specially designed sterile cryosamplers carried aboard a balloon launched from the Indian Space Research Organisation/ Tata Institute Balloon Facility in Hyderabad, India, on Jan 21, 2001. Although the recovered biomaterial contained many microorganisms, as assessed with standard microbiological tests, we were able to culture only two types; both similar to known terrestrial species.2 Our findings lend support to the view that microbial material falling from space is, in a Darwinian sense, highly evolved, with an evolutionary history closely related to life that exists on Earth. We estimate that a tonne of bacterial material falls to Earth from space daily, which translates into some 1019 bacteria, or 20 000 bacteria per square metre of the Earth's surface. Most of this material simply adds to the unculturable or uncultured microbial flora present on Earth..... ...With respect to the SARS outbreak, a prima facie case for a possible space incidence can already be made. First, the virus is unexpectedly novel, and appeared without warning in mainland China. A small amount of the culprit virus introduced into the stratosphere could make a first tentative fall out East of the great mountain range of the Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, followed by sporadic deposits in neighbouring areas. If the virus is only minimally infective, as it seems to be, the subsequent course of its global progress will depend on stratospheric transport and mixing, leading to a fall out continuing seasonally over a few years. Addendum: My husband says this is wacky; that the microorganisms in the stratosphere get sucked up there from storms and water evaporation here on earth. He's got a point. After all, doesn't it sometimes rain fish? posted by Sydney on 5/23/2003 08:08:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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