Flu from Venus?

If it could be proved that germs reach the earth from other planets, scientists would be very much surprised. But last week scientists were considering the idea. Professor Louis Backman of Uppsala University, Stockholm, a pharmacologist and medical writer well known throughout Europe, had suggested that it was entirely possible that organisms causing recent flu epidemics had come from Venus, Jupiter or Mars.

Scientists have debated such possibilities for nearly a hundred years. The great physicist Helmholtz believed that life was brought to the earth by meteorites.* Laboratory workers have known for some time that bacteria and other living cells can survive extreme cold close to absolute zero ( -- 273.18 C.), the supposed temperature of interplanetary space. The University of California's Professor Charles B. Lipman once claimed that he had actually found living bacteria locked in meteorites millions of years old.

No one else has confirmed Lipman's finding, and scientists have remained skeptical. One reason is that most modern physicists believe that cosmic rays and short-wave light rays (particularly ultraviolet) would destroy any life passing through interstellar space. Professor Backman's hypothesis attacks this objection.

Out of this World. Backman believes it very unlikely that life originated on the earth; he thinks it more probably started in the more favorable atmospheres containing methane and ammonia gases which surround planets such as Jupiter, Venus and Mars. From them, he says, living organisms may have been transported to the earth by meteorites or by the propulsive power of the sun's rays.

"At minus 273 degrees," he comments, "even the most violent chemical reactions, are forced to complete inactivity. No reactions, no life processes can take place; even molecular movement ceases. Without molecular movement, no evaporation can take place. Thus all reactions produced by light rays are precluded, and as the life processes have eased, the organism cannot be damaged by chemical or physical means."

Thus, Backman believes, organisms riding on cosmic particles or meteorites might fly safely through celestial space. He admits they would meet a great hazard when they hit the earth's atmosphere, where atmospheric friction would heat the particles or meteorites enough to destroy all organisms clinging to them. But he believes that the atmosphere may tear the organisms away from their carriers before they get too hot. Any such free-floating bacteria which came in on the earth's dark side, shaded from the sun, might drop safely to earth. Q.E.D.

* The late, eccentric antiscientist Charles Fort claimed to believe that inhabitants of another world were deliberately shooting rocks and pieces of iron at the earth.

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