Scientist at center of Mars flap speaks out

The story breaks
Berger’s story, which was also published on MSNBC.com as part of a content-sharing deal, described the Sunday event as a "private meeting," not a party.

It also cited the attendees as saying that Stoker and Lemke had said their findings had been submitted to Nature and were currently being peer-reviewed.

The story was careful to point out, however, that no one was saying there was direct evidence of current life on Mars:

“What Stoker and Lemke have found, according to several attendees of the private meeting, is not direct proof of life on Mars, but methane signatures and other signs of possible biological activity remarkably similar to those recently discovered in caves here on Earth.”

That distinction got somewhat lost in the days that followed, as others news services picked up the story and some headlines suggested that the scientists had in fact found life on Mars.

Stoker and Lemke declined all interview requests and NASA issued an unusual denial a few days later.

“The work by the scientists mentioned in the reports cannot be used to directly infer anything about life on Mars,” a press release stated. “No research paper has been submitted by them to any scientific journal asserting Martian life."

‘The rest of the scientific community reads this and they think obviously this information is incorrect, it can't possibly be true. ... So they think, they must be stupid.’ Carol Stoker

The work at Rio Tinto “may help formulate the strategy for how to search for Martian life,” the statement said, since the research “concerns extreme environments on Earth as analogs of possible environments on Mars.”

Stoker now says that the damage was already done and that the conclusions attributed to her created initial skeptical impressions in the minds of her colleagues.

“You get this kind of aghast thing, the rest of the scientific community reads this and they think obviously this information is incorrect, it can’t possibly be true. You can’t possibly have evidence for new life on Mars by drilling holes in Spain, it’s just impossible. So they think, they must be stupid.”

As a result, she says, “you attract a reputation as somebody who isn’t cautious, and isn’t careful about what you say.”

Wider consequences
The “false alarm” did not just impact Stoker and Lemke, she says, but her colleagues in Spain as well.

“I think it damaged the reputation of the project,” she says. “The impression I have is my collaborators in Spain were aghast, there were mumblings and grumblings from their scientific community that cast aspersions on the project.”

“This is a big project, with a lot of people involved,” she says. “I think the entire project was damaged because of it.”

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