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The Calm Before The Storm: An Interview With Dr. Gilbert Levin: "One of the Principal Investigators for the NASA Viking biology team was Dr. Gilbert V. Levin who invented and built the Viking Labeled Release Experiment. His experiment tested the soil of Mars nine times at two different landing sites under different temperature regimes and environmental conditions. All his data point to microbes metabolizing a nutrient solution and giving off an indicative radioactive CO2 gas. In 1997, Levin simultaneously reported in my book MARS: THE LIVING PLANET and in an Astrobiology Proceedings paper for the SPIE, that his experiment definitely detected living organisms on the surface of Mars. He has been highly criticized by many of his peers, but certainly not all. With the recent smoking gun evidence of meandering river channels on Mars formed by liquid water, the odds that Mars once had life and still has life today have gone up significantly.

In the following conversation I talk with Dr. Levin about his early work as a Sanitary Engineer and how it got him involved with NASA and the search for life on Mar"

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