By Claudia Ricci 

    It was 1957 when the University’s  
John Delano first fell in love with the skies,  
but he remembers the night  
as if it happened yesterday. 

     “My parents took me outside on a crisp, cool October night in 1957 and they said, ‘We’re going to show you Sputnik.’ I was nine years old, a simple country boy from the backwoods of New Hampshire, and I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about. But they took me outside and we oriented ourselves and looked up and there it was, slowly and majestically moving across the clear, star-filled autumn sky. Although I cannot explain it, the sight of that first human-engineered object moving with apparent deliberateness and pride across the sky, in contrast to the split second streaks of most meteors, changed me.”

     More than four decades later, Delano is still staring into the sky. He is still just as awed by what he sees there as he was as a child. He talks about the planets, the stars, the moon and the meteorites with the same enthusiasm too. But there is also an important difference. Today, Delano is a nationally recognized geochemist and one of a handful of scientists leading the nation in trying to answer some of the most basic questions about the universe — questions that occur to all of us as we look up into the night sky.

     Working under a $4 million grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Delano and five other Albany-area scientists are investigating the origins of life. The four-year research program, funded last July, is a multidisciplinary project, incorporating the expertise of a broad range of scientists. Besides Delano, the  NASA project draws on the work of five scientists from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in nearby Troy: two in astrophysics, one in biology, one in biochemistry and one in planetary science. Leading the project is James Ferris, a chemist at Rensselaer who has spent most of his scientific career trying to answer questions about how life began.

     Delano arrived at this point in his career through a series of what he calls “singular events.” The first event, of course, was the night his parents took him outside to see Sputnik. “From that point on, I started saving a quarter a week, all my allowance, for the next five years to 
get a telescope,” Delano says. The night he brought his inexpensive telescope home from the store proved to be another singular event. 

     “I remember it was late when we got home and it was cold outside and my parents said I had to get to bed. So I couldn’t take it outdoors. So instead, I opened up my window and trained the telescope up at the moon. I looked up, and all the heat was pouring out my window and it gave my telescope lens a shimmering effect and the view was blurry, but still, it was just great. I saw the moon through the shimmering light and I knew I was seeing it closer than I’d ever seen it before and it was just fantastic. Another epiphany for me.” 
An outstanding physics and chemistry teacher in high school proved to be the next important impetus in Delano’s move toward planetary science. Mrs. Julia Warburton knew how to make science come alive. “With her, science was fun. It was as tough as nails, but tough was fun. I’d bring in a book on Einstein’s theory of relativity and she’d be right there, answering all my questions.” With her encouragement, Delano developed a prize-winning science fair project in tenth grade. “I used my own idea and I determined the orbital speed of the moon using my telescope and watching the moon move into the earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse.” Incredibly, the average observational speed Delano came up with fell within a mere three miles per hour of the moon’s actual orbital speed.

     Fast forward ahead. Delano graduated from Cornell University and in 1977, he earned his Ph.D. in geochemistry from the State University at Stony Brook. His doctoral work involved a study of moon rocks from one of the early Apollo missions. Delano says it was John F. Kennedy’s decision to send a man to the moon that proved to be another epiphany. “I figured, by golly, that if America was going to the moon, then I wanted to be part of that.” And he was. Delano studied moon rock samples from a total of four Apollo flights during the 1970s. The goal of that research: to determine the total chemical composition of the moon.

Delano, second from right, was appointed by NASA to be part of a science team that examined operations at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Other members were, from left, Malcolm Rutherford (Brown University), Douglas Macdougall (University of California at San Diego), Andrew Davis (University of Chicago), and Gregory Herzog (Rutgers University).

     Today, Delano is back studying moon rocks again, but this time, it’s for the new NASA project. Delano’s research has two basic objectives: the first is to investigate the molecular composition of the early atmosphere of the Earth, to see if conditions could have contributed to the origin of life. The second goal is to find out more about the challenges that faced early life forms. “Meteorites were continually bombarding the Earth,” Delano explains. Primitive life forms would arise and just start to take hold when, BLAM, another meteorite would strike, raising the temperature of the oceans to a boiling point, sterilizing the oceans and the entire ecosystem, wiping out all life forms.”

     Among the questions that Delano and his colleagues hope to answer: how often did life arise on Earth? How far did life forms progress before they were wiped out? How big were the meteorites that were responsible for doing the damage? “Life may have started at least a dozen times on Earth before it was able to take hold,” Delano says.

     It might seem odd that Delano is studying moon samples and not Earth samples to learn more about the origins of life. But the explanation is simple: until about 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth and the moon were joined together. “Cosmically, whatever was happening to the moon was also happening to the Earth,” Delano says. The moon’s craters, most of which are about four billion years old, retain in a relatively pristine condition a geochemical “memory” of what was going on relative to meteorite bombardment.

 
  
     Stored in a small glass vial, the dark powdery moon dirt samples Delano is studying look like they might have come from anybody’s backyard garden. But this is no ordinary dirt. Within it are thousands of miniscule glass beads that formed eons ago when a meteorite struck the moon’s surface, sending an explosive molten spray in all directions. The melted surface of the moon refroze into the glass spherules. “Those individual glass beads each have a memory of exactly when in history the meteor hit,” Delano explains, holding up the glass vial. “Through chemistry, each bead tells a story,” a story of bombardment on both the moon and the Earth at different points in geological history. 
     Despite the repeated meteorite attacks, of course, life eventually did succeed on Earth. Starting about four billion years ago, meteor and asteroid assaults on our planet started to diminish in frequency. Single-celled life forms took hold and began to thrive. So what conclusion do Delano and others draw from the research they’ve done so far on the processes that gave rise to life? 
     “We are beginning to suspect that life happens easily,” he says. “Life is robust, determined and aggressive. And if that’s true, go outside and stand there on a starry night and wave to your neighbors. Because the chances are very good that there are many other places in the universe where life forms exist.” 
     The first place besides Earth where scientists are starting to investigate life (last summer’s Pathfinder mission is the first effort in this regard) is on neighboring Mars, a planet that Delano describes as a “basket case.” The reason: Mars is losing its atmosphere fast. At one point in history, Delano says, Mars “was warm, wet and geologically active, and it had a thick atmosphere. Now it’s none of those things. Because it’s a small planet, it cooled off early and couldn’t hold onto its atmosphere.” 
     Because of these adverse conditions, Delano says “we’ll need to look for evidence of life on Mars very carefully. If we’re quiet and aggressive, I think we’ll find it. And if two places on our dinky solar system have life, if life has that range of adaptation, think of the possibilities elsewhere.” 

Claudia Ricci, Ph.D.’96, who teaches writing in the University’s Educational Opportunity Program, is also a free-lance journalist and fiction writer. 

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