A decade after their discovery, few scientists believe these ball and wormlike shapes imaged by an electronmicroscope inside a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth in Antarctica really are indicative of life, even bacterial life. Mainly because they’re way too small for life as it is understood.
"`We certainly have not convinced the [scientific] community, and that’s been a little bit disappointing,’ David McKay, a NASA biochemist and leader of the team that started the scientific episode," said a few days ago.
Yet for all the doubts–which were also present at NASA’s unveiling of the meteorite in 1996–no one has yet explained the shapes, any more than they have explained the similar ones University of Texas emeritus geologist Robert Folk first found in rocks from an Italian hot springs and later in everything from rust to kidney stones to Austin tap water.
It was Folk’s discovery of what he chose to call "nannobacteria" (because he asserted the shapes could not have been made by any known sedimentary process) that started McKay and his colleagues hunting inside the Martian rock, where they found the same shapes.
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