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weather, and the search for water present and past.
    In the early 2000s, the United Kingdom sent Beagle 2, a small probe designed to look for life-sustaining habitats, to Mars, and Levin tried without success to get a life-detection instrument into the mix there as well. Speaking with BBC News before the planned landing, deputy mission manager Mark Adler explained that Beagle’s mission was to better understand the water environment of Mars and not to search for life as Levin urged. “What we learnt from Viking is that it is very difficult to come up with specific experiments to look for something when you don’t really know what to look for.” But it all became moot when Beagle’s mission controllost contact with the spacecraft as it entered the Martian atmosphere, and disappeared. Levin did succeed in getting a bare-bones life-detection experiment onto a Russian mission to Mars in 1996, but that effort failed before it even reached the planet.
    Still Levin is seeking vindication and has (among others) his physicist son Ron Levin working with him. In 1986, the senior Levin told a Viking ten-year reunion gathering at the National Academy of Sciences that “it is more likely than not that the Viking LR detected life.” In 1997, he argued in a paper for the Proceedings of the International Society for Optical Engineering , which society has an active astrobiology program, that twenty years of additional Mars research had convinced him that his Viking experiment had definitely detected life and that NASA and the scientific consensus were wrong. Nine years after that publication, with an appreciation of Levin’s work emanating from a new generation of Mars scientists, an Argentinian scientist proposed the name Gillevinia straata as the genus and species of the bacteria-like organism ostensibly identified by Viking. But that idea did not garner much support. Levin was not invited to give a talk at the official thirtieth anniversary of the Viking mission.
    To this day, Levin is not inclined to think that the absence of a firm definition of “life” played a significant role in the scientific community’s reluctance to accept his Viking data; it’s something of a red herring, he says, used to protect important people from having to admit they were wrong. But that refusal to entertain other possibilities, to essentially reject the notion that testing for life on Mars might require a different way of thinking, is what frustrates many scientists about Levin. Yes, Levin is tirelessly and heroically defending a result defined at the time as positive. Yes, the experiment uncovered something of great interest, and nobody has been able to explain why the Labeled Release and its control behaved as they did.
    But thirty years of additional research and thinking about Mars has, in many ways, turned Viking’s simple models about life on their heads. As Meyer explained it, “In some ways, you could say that Viking was too Earth-centric. It presumed life has metabolism and respiration that resultsin production of carbon dioxide that we can recognize. It also presumed that if you land anywhere on Mars you can measure life.” He said that while NASA has at times used the definition of life as a “self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution,” it was not a formal position, and the agency was increasingly inclined to accept the reasoning of Cleland and others that “life” cannot be currently defined, any more than water could be in the sixteenth century. “Probably the characterization people are most comfortable with is the Supreme Court one on pornography, that ‘we know it when we see it.’ But for a variety of pretty obvious reasons, that one really didn’t fly.” Describing essential characteristics of life—that’s certainly possible. But a final, all-encompassing definition that provides the invaluable solid