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To: John Carragher who wrote (2661)	5/23/2003 9:23:29 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Respond to of 37270

SARS an invader from outer space? By LUMA MUHTADIE Globe and Mail Update E-mail this Article Print this Article Advertisement An international group of scientists has come to believe that the deadly SARS virus is an invader from outer space. A letter signed by two astronomers and a microbiologist, and published in this week's issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, offers the theory that the SARS virus fell into the earth's stratosphere and landed unexpectedly in mainland China. "It sounds sort of outrageous or impossible, and indeed it would be if we had definite information that life on earth and evolution was a closed box affair," Chandra Wickramasinghe, director of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in Britain told Globeandmail.com. "We have evidence that something like a hundred tonnes of organic debris from comets enters the Earth's atmosphere on a daily basis. We concluded that one tonne of that is microbial material," he said. Dr. Wickramasinghe collaborated with researchers in India, who launched a massive hot-air balloon equipped with high-tech sampling devices. The balloon drifts lazily to a height of 41 kilometres above the earth's surface, where the radio-controlled cryosamplers suck in the thin atmosphere, compressing it in metal cylinders for examination back on Earth. The cylinders are then sent to Britain, where the air is released through filters that collect the bacteria. Bacterial DNA is then isolated and put through a series of tests. "Our findings support the view that microbial material falling from space is highly evolved, with an evolutionary history closely related to life on earth," Dr. Wickramasinghe said. Against this backdrop, he suggests that because SARS is a new coronavirus, with no genetic similarity to other coronaviruses, and because it arrived so unexpectedly, it may have come from the tonne of microbial material descending daily from space. He said a small amount of the SARS virus could have first fallen east of the Himalayas, where the stratosphere is thinnest, then dropped sporadically in neighbouring areas. "This is not a back of the envelope theory," Milton Wainwright of the Department of Biology and Biotechnology at Britain's Sheffield University, and one of scientists who signed the Lancet letter, told Globeandmail.com. "It hasn't been proven, but it's a very logical and coherent theory. [Dr. Wickramasinghe] has been working on it for 30 years and it has stood the test of time." The letter writers say new cases might continue to appear until the stratospheric source of the virus becomes exhausted. theglobeandmail.com