WITHOUT water, life could not exist. Or so the theory goes. But this basic tenet of science, which has dictated the search for living systems on other planets, is being challenged. Biologists, chemists and physicists will convene in the UK next week to think the unthinkable – that water may not, after all, be one of life’s essential ingredients.
“It is taken as axiomatic that life requires water,” says Roy Daniel, an enzymologist at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, who helped to organise the meeting. “But if it’s true, we ought to know why. We don’t.”
The possible…
