Astrobiologists gather at NASA
Conference examines origins of life on Earth, elsewhere in the universe, and
the future
By Ivan Oransky

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF-If you want to know where you're going, it helps to
know where you've been. Nowhere was that more true than at the third
Astrobiology Science Conference, which began here on Sunday (March 28) and
runs through Thursday at the NASA Ames Research Center.

The conference, which drew more than 700 participants, according to
organizer Lynn Rothschild, a NASA Ames research scientist, focused on three
questions: "Where do we come from?" "Are we alone?" and
"Where are we
 going?" Previous efforts have focused on the first two questions, while
giving short shrift to the third, Rothschild told The Scientist. "I think
astrobiology has grown as a discipline," she said. Last year, NASA issued a
final version of its Astrobiology Roadmap.

The Mars expeditions may be the focus of much attention right now-and there
was buzz here earlier in the week about data on "concretions" found by the
Mars Rover that may or may not suggest the presence of fossils-but Earth is
still the easiest place to figure out how life may have developed here and
elsewhere. Indeed, the home planet took center stage-in fact, a 10-foot
image of the Earth hovered behind the speaker's podium, next to smaller
images of a galaxy and a familiar red neighbor planet. So a number of the
talks and posters presented here looked an awful lot like traditional
evolutionary, ecologic, and molecular biology.

Read the rest at The Scientist dot com
http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20040401/04

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