It came from outer space: something insidious and deadly that wormed its way
into human society to devastating effect.
Not a colony of androids - the SARS virus. At least that's the theory of a
group of British scientists.
Chandra Wickramasinghe believes SARS could have migrated from the
stratosphere and been dumped in the Himalayas and surrounding areas, where it
might have been dormant for many years before finding a person to latch on to.
If that sounds far-fetched, then let it be known that Professor
Wickramasinghe, of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, is no crank. Indeed, his
theory was aired yesterday in The Lancet, where he writes that it is
already established that bacteria exist high above the Earth.
He recounts an experiment two years ago in which samples were taken from a
balloon 41 kilometres above India. The sterile bags came back chock-full of
micro-organisms - but most could not be cultured in the laboratory. Only two
were successfully grown on Earth, but that was sufficient proof of the concept.
"Our findings lend support to the view that microbial material falling from
space is, in a Darwinian sense, highly evolved, with an evolutionary history
closely related to life that exists on Earth," he wrote.
Meanwhile, history was awash with plagues and pestilences that arose
suddenly, disappeared just as mysteriously, and could not be explained by
standard biology.
The 1918 flu pandemic, which flared in waves throughout the world, hit
Alaskan villages that had been isolated for months by snow and ice. That,
Professor Wickramasinghe said, might indicate that, rather than human
transmission, a patchy global space dump was occurring.
"With respect to the SARS outbreak, a prima facie case for a possible space
incidence can already be made," he wrote.
While most scientists suspect a mutated animal bug, the SARS virus - which
has killed more than 680 and infected about 8000 - is unlike animal and human
pathogens, and emerged without warning.
If SARS really is an alien, its global progress would "depend on
stratospheric transport and mixing, leading to a fall-out continuing seasonally
over a few years".
And in the grand science fiction tradition, the future remains an open
question: "New cases might continue to appear until the stratospheric supply of
the causative agent becomes exhausted."
