LESS than an hour after Genesis had crashed into the Utah desert a television commentator had already raised the question: could this craft be bringing back some kind of “Andromeda strain”, an unknown, dangerous organism from deep space.
The consensus among NASA scientists, however, is that the risk from contamination is low. The region of space visited by Genesis, near the Earth, contains the kind of cosmic dust that has been raining down on Earth every day for billions of years. Studies have shown that any organisms in the dust would survive the gentle entry into the atmosphere, so whatever…
