Calling for Down-to-Earth Research, Anthropologist Rocks the Space Boat

Sandy Harcourt wasn’t prepared for the hostile reaction he got when he suggested recently that the nation’s science priorities are askew. In a letter published in the British journal Nature, the biological anthropologist at UC Davis said the search for fossilized evidence of life on Mars can wait, but that the search for a better understanding of life on this planet cannot.

“The score on replies so far is one for, at least 10 against, some of them vituperatively against” his position, Harcourt says.

The Cambridge-trained expert on gorillas admits now that he violated one fundamental rule in science etiquette: Never speak ill of another scientific field, even if yours is dying from malnutrition.

“There is a feeling that we have to support funding for all sciences in order to ensure that the funding for our science continues,” he says. “We don’t want divisions within the camp.”

He says he doesn’t buy that, but his experience underscores the fact that any scientist who challenges the obvious inequities in research funding in this country does so at considerable personal peril.

Stinging from the criticism, Harcourt says he never intended to imply that space research was unimportant. Indeed, his letter concludes with this paragraph:

“I am not anti-astronomy: Hale-Bopp is going to be a memory of a lifetime. But space can wait; Earth can’t. I have a suggestion. For every new observatory, every new Hubble (every new repair of Hubble!), exactly matching funds from the same source should be automatically provided for the discovery and identification of new life forms on Earth.”

Space exploration is booming these days, due in large part to the existence of a huge federal bureaucracy and a highly dependent industrial community. Proposed cuts in the budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration draw cries of anguish from across the country, while there is scarcely a whimper over declining funding for many scientific ventures closer to home.

The urgency for research is here, not in space, Harcourt says, because the Earth is changing and we know so little about so much of it.

Mars will be no different 1,000 years from now, he says, but “wait even 50 years, and what we find on Earth will be vastly different from what we find now.” He is puzzled over human preoccupation with evidence of ancient life on Mars and indifference to rare forms of life on Earth.

“Why is the chemistry of a rock on Mars so interesting to the public? Why is the chemistry of the poison in a New Guinea bird’s feathers uninteresting by comparison?”

He says the pitohui bird could be extinct in 50 years, before we have a chance to understand why its poisoned feathers have the identical toxin to frogs in South America.

“Just think: a bird in New Guinea with the same poison as a frog in South America. An intense toxin, a nerve toxin. Why only this one family of frogs? Why only this one family of birds? How do either the frogs or the birds survive the toxin? Why was it only five years ago that someone thought to check for toxins in bird skin, when we’ve known for a long time that some birds taste foul? Why?”

Harcourt says that unlike the dead microbes--if indeed they are microbes--in the famous meteorite from Mars, new forms of life are discovered on this planet that are at least as strange as whatever may have existed on Mars. As serendipity would have it, just as we finished talking on the telephone, San Francisco State announced the discovery of bizarre worms that thrive on mounds of toxic methane ice in the Gulf of Mexico.

The worms, with two rows of oar-like appendages, join a growing number of creatures discovered in recent years in areas where no life was thought to exist.

Harcourt says he fears that too often these days scientific projects get funded just because they are so expensive. If it costs a lot, he says, people think it must be important. A high price tag gets everybody’s attention.

“You hear colleagues talking among themselves about who is doing the most important work,” he says. “It’s not what they are doing, but how much money they’ve got. Surely it’s what they are doing that is important, not how much money they got to do it.”

Space exploration is expensive, he says, so people think it’s important. But he and literally thousands of other scientists believe it doesn’t make sense to shortchange research closer to home while spending billions on space.

One thing that bothers Harcourt is all the publicity over the Hubble Space Telescope. “They say, ‘Look at these wonderful photographs!’ It [the Hubble] cost $2.5 billion. They had better be wonderful photographs,” he says.

By the way, the instrument Harcourt uses to study gorillas is a pair of binoculars. Cost: about $300.

Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]