RICH MATHIES
RICH MATHIES
MARK CREELMAN
(l. to r.) A typical Raman spectroscopy workbench in the Mathies lab. Mathies climbing the Devils Thumb, near Petersburg, AK, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the 1970s. Mathies in Chile’s Atacama Desert in 2005, where he tested a prototype of the device scheduled to fly to Mars in 2013.
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of chemistry, engineering and biology. It was a transformative time in my career, and I think it was for Rich, too.” In his days as a graduate student, Mathies tackled the cold, wet and harsh environment of southeast Alaska. In the last decade Mathies has ventured to one of the hottest and driest places on the planet, Chile’s Atacama desert. There, in 2005, along with graduate student Alison Skelley (Ph.D. ’05, Chem) and colleagues from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he performed experiments to verify that he could detect signs of life in an environment similar to Mars. The Mathies group is refining a device, the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA), part of an instrument package scheduled to fly to Mars in 2013 on the European Space Agency ExoMars mission. During the mission, instruments will dissolve Martian soil with water, add fluorescent tags that selectively bind with certain organic molecules, dry the samples and use a laser to check for amino acids, amines and fragments of DNA and RNA. Amino acids can be detected at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. If amino acids are detected, the MOA will use microcapillary electrophoresis to analyze their composition and to check the “handedness” or chirality of the amino acids. Inorganic processes produce left- and right-handed amino acids in roughly equal proportions. If the MOA detects only left-handed amino acids on Mars, that would indicate they were produced by life processes similar to those on Earth, where life evolved using only left-handed amino acids. “But what if the MOA detects mostly right-handed amino acids in
College of Chemistry, UC Berkeley
Martian soil?,” asks Mathies. “That would indicate that Martian life evolved in a way distinct from life on Earth.” The ExoMars rover is scheduled to land on Mars in 2015, after a two-year journey across the solar system. “The odds of a successful Mars landing are about 50/50,” says Mathies, “so I am not getting my hopes up too high. But sending an instrument to test for life on Mars is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s likely to be my last experiment, my most expensive experiment and perhaps the most important.” Looking back on the research tools he has created over three decades, Mathies sees them as extensions of ourselves. Some tools allow us to reach all the way out to Mars, dig in the soil and examine it to find traces of life that may have existed millions of years ago. Other tools let us tease apart the minute details of our DNA with a device that can sit in the palm of a hand. “There have been four central scientific issues that have made humankind question the nature of our place in the universe,” says Mathies. “They are the realization that the world is round; the discovery that the Earth is not the center of the universe; the sequencing of the human genome; and the unresolved question of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe. Two of those issues were resolved long before my time, but I’m happy to have played, and to be playing, a part in two of the remaining fundamental issues of human existence.”