This discourse will address the question, ‘What is life?’ and may even produce a satisfactory answer. Life has been around for a long time. The age of the Earth is four and half billion years but there are signs in the oldest rocks on Earth that the environment could have supported life four billion years ago. There was almost certainly life on Earth by three and a half billion years ago, but for at least three billion years after the world’s population consisted only of microbes. Signs of past life are hard to find since most materials on Earth are recycled, especially organic matter, which is re-used by other organisms. Amazingly, the exhaled breath of life may be one of the most durable and abundant signs of past organisms and the key to finding life on Mars. In a demonstration-rich discourse, Prof Coleman will attempt to prove this point and others. He will then show how laboratory analytical instruments have to be miniaturised dramatically (by factors of a thousand) and adapted for flight to Mars.

Max Coleman’s training combined chemistry, geology and geochemistry at London and Leeds Universities, but he found that he needed to encompass microbiology too when studying sedimentary rocks. He has applied multidisciplinary fundamental scientific research to elicit solutions to practical problems in petroleum exploration and production, environmental pollution, radioactive waste storage and forensic science. He now uses the same approaches to search for life on other planets. After ten years at the British Geological Survey he joined BP in 1983. Then in 1995 he moved to the University of Reading as Professor of Sedimentology. Prof Coleman was enticed to join the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in 2003 to be Director of the Center for Life Detection and Leader of the Astrobiology Research Group.

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