NASA: “DNA Building Blocks Actually Created in Space”

Updated with MP3 audio in Interview.

“That’s one of the biggest questions for NASA as they go out to search
for signs of life elsewhere. What would alien life look like?”

- Michael Callahan, Ph.D., Astrochemist, NASA Goddard

Michael Callahan, Ph.D., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead author of a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that describes how his Goddard team ground up samples of twelve carbon-rich meteorites, nine of which were recovered from Antarctica. The team found adenine and guanine, which are components of DNA called nucleobases. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules. See: PNAS. — Michael Callahan, Ph.D., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead author of a paper in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* that describes how his Goddard team ground up samples of twelve carbon-rich meteorites, nine of which were recovered from Antarctica. The team found adenine and guanine, which are components of DNA called nucleobases. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules. See: PNAS.

August 26, 2011 Greenbelt, Maryland - There is an Astrochemistry Lab at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. There, Research Physical Astrochemist Michael P. Callahan, Ph.D., has been studying a dozen carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that have fallen from space to Earth. Nine of them came from Antarctica because he wanted to concentrate his research on meteorites that would be more protected from terrestrial contamination. The cold, icy environment of the South Polar region provides better preservation. What Dr. Callahan has been looking for in the carbon-rich meteorites are chemistries related to life that had to have been created in space.

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