The Life Scientific: Caroline Smith

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Caroline Smith:at Whole Foods Market. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The July Savings Event from Apple Vacations is here. Book by July 23rd and save up to$400 off your flight and hotel package to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, Hawaii, or Europe. From all-inclusive escapes to bucket list adventures, Apple Vacations makes it easy to create memories with the people who matter most. Start today at applevacations.com or contact your trusted travel advisor.

1:03My guest today's passion is space rocks, whether they're samples collected from the surface of the moon or asteroids and hopefully one day Mars, or meteorites, those alien rock fragments that have survived their fiery descents through our atmosphere to land here on Earth. Caroline Smith is Head of Collections and Principal Curator of Meteorites at the Natural History Museum. home to one of the finest meteorite collections in the world. Her interest in rocks began while wandering the foothills of the Rocky Mountains as a child, picking up the ones that caught her eye and bashing them with a hammer, hoping to find treasure inside, whether it's gold, diamonds or dinosaur fossils.

1:43Her work today studying rocks, both those from outer space and those still out there, is no less ambitious. She analyses their chemical composition, looking for tantalising clues that might reveal how our solar system formed and potentially even the presence of the chemical building blocks necessary for life itself. Caroline Smith, welcome to Life Scientific. Thanks, Jim. Now, as I mentioned, the Natural History Museum is home to one of the finest collections of meteorites. Do you have a favourite? I have several favourites, but probably my most favourite favourite is a meteorite called Narcla, a Martian meteorite.

2:19I've studied it extensively over my career. It fell in Egypt in 1911. Reputedly, it killed a dog when it fell, but the reports of that were probably a little bit made up. It's known as the dog-killing meteorite, but we're pretty sure that no dog saw its demise by this meteorite landing on it. And I've actually been able to bring a piece of it to show you. Let's have a look then. So I'm going to put my gloves on and I'll hand it over to you. I bought you some large ones. Hopefully they'll be the right size. Right, OK. Right, I'm going to hand it over to you. I mean, it's a tiny fragment. this is not the whole...

2:51No, no, no, that's a three gram fragment off a piece that was about half a kilo. What can you tell me about it? One side has got this black shiny surface, that's where the rock has actually burnt and got so hot it's actually melted. As it's coming down through the atmosphere, exactly. But the main colour you can probably see is that lovely sort of, it's actually not dissimilar to the shirt that you're wearing today, like a sort of olive green colour. I wore it specially. I was going to say, it's obviously good planning there, but it's got this lovely sparkly texture. Yes, the sparkles in the light.

3:21Exactly. I can also see flecks of orange and red. Good spot. What you're seeing there is iron oxide and clay minerals and you only get these forming when you have liquid water. As we realised these types of meteorites are actually from Mars, that became a very important area of study. And the fact that there was water, possible life. Exactly. So what can meteorites in general tell us about the early solar system billions of years ago, maybe even the origin of life on Earth? Meteorites can tell us so much. They really are the builder's rubble left over after the solar system formed and they're giving us that insight into those foundational materials.

4:04We do know there are fundamental things that you need for life to happen. So heat or light, organic molecules, time for that potential life to develop and water is the critical thing. And what about this idea that maybe a meteorite brought the stuff for life to Earth from say Mars? So it's not that we think there were little bugs in these meteorites but what we do think is that those meteorites delivered those key building blocks you need for life to start. I imagine the meteorites of course are very valuable so you've brought this one here to the BBC by taxi rather than public transport. Correct.

4:42But what about when there's a meteorite on the other side of the world that you want to bring to the museum? How do you ensure that it arrives safely? I've been very lucky to go and collect two very significant samples and actually because of the preciousness of the samples we were able to put the meteorites in the captain's locker and that's actually also where things like diplomatic bags go as well. So some of our meteorites have shared aircraft with diplomatic bags. I don't know what was in those diplomatic bags but I'm sure it was interesting stuff. Well Caroline you'd be lucky to actually see a meteorite fall to earth from space but how often do they land?

5:16Maybe a few hundred maybe low thousand land on earth every year and of those 10 to 20 that are actually witnessed to fall and actually are collected but one of the things that we have now which has really helped to find meteorites when they fall is security cameras so people have cameras in their cars or you know on their doorbells and things like that. It's all recorded. Yeah, it's all recorded, yeah. OK, Caroline Smith, you were born in Middlesex in the mid-70s. Yes, I was born in Middlesex. Mum and dad both worked in the airline industry, although my mum had given up work before having me. They both worked for Pan American.

5:54So, yeah, they met each other in the airlines. I had a really lovely childhood growing up because of my dad's job. We used to go to America a lot. I mean, it was not uncommon for us to go shopping in New York for the weekend. Just sort of free flights. Free flights, exactly. But you weren't particularly well off. Oh, goodness, no. I mean, we weren't poor, but it was a perk of working in the airlines. I gather also that each summer you'd go to the Rocky Mountains. It was wonderful. So we had some very good friends, Uncle Bob and Auntie Midge, and they had this lovely ranch and they had horses and they had dogs.

6:26And I would go off with the dogs with a hammer, some safety goggles, and I would go round looking for interesting looking rocks. Interesting rocks, right. And did you find anything? Not that I remember, but there was always that excitement. Am I going to find some gold? Am I going to find a dinosaur? Am I going to find diamonds? Of course, now I know that there's no way I would have found any of those things in that area. But at the time, it was like my own little sort of detective treasure hunt. Well, back at home, you enjoyed primary school. But when you were 11, your parents separated. They did, yeah.

6:57It was a pretty tough time. It certainly affected my understanding of how things can change very quickly. and there was nothing that you can do about it. And we were basically left penniless. So my mum had to find work very quickly. My wonderful nana, my mum's mum, stepped in to help. But yes, it put the fear of God into me. You know, I'd been brought up, my mum and dad, from very sort of working class backgrounds where, you know, money was always tight. So I was always brought up to have a great respect for money. I think it had quite an effect on me. Around this time, in fact, on the 21st of December 1988, 1888, Pan Am flight 103, travelling from London to New York, was destroyed by a terrorist bomb while flying over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing everyone on board and bringing death and devastation to the small town itself.

7:45As you mentioned, your father worked for Pan Am, and he in fact knew the crew on that flight very well. What do you remember from that time? Oh, it still gives me chills around that time of year. My nana was looking after me. I was already in my pyjamas and suddenly there was a news flash saying a plane has crashed the Pan American 103 and our jaws dropped because when my dad was working for Pan Am, if he was on a day shift, he was not allowed to leave work until the Pan Am 103 had left. And I mean, it was absolutely devastating because when my dad, it absolutely shook him to the core. And what impact did this all have on you?

8:24I think my parents tried to shield me from some of those stories that were very close to home, let's say. But seeing the effect of this on my father and other very close family friends, very traumatising at the time. By now you were at secondary school. I gather you enjoyed it there, but you weren't that interested in studying. That's true. I mean, I did pay attention to my studies, but I found everything quite easy. And when you moved to the local sixth form college, that felt like a big change for you. It was a huge change. And in fact, I remember vividly the then principal said, this is the closest you are going to get to going to university without going.

9:05If you don't turn up to your lectures and your classes, that's on you. And did you? No. This is one of those ones where it's slightly embarrassing talking about this on national radio. I was an absolute idiot because I breezed through my GCSEs. I thought that I could do the same with my A-levels. Including geology. I loved geology, absolutely. It was my favourite. Did you have that love from your childhood days in the Rocky Mountains? Well, it's funny you should say that. I mean, I've spoken with my mum about it since and she thinks there must have been that thing. It was there in the back of your mind.

9:36It was there in the back of my mind, exactly. And we had our mock exams, I did OK-ish in those and I just didn't really pull my socks up enough when it came to do the exams. And I had an absolute car crash. Shocker. and I remember opening the envelope at college and just literally feeling physically sick and arriving at home and opening their door. My mum's like, how did you do? And she could just see, you know, I was white. What grades did you get? I can't remember, but one of them was an ungraded and one of them was an N. Really wasn't good, Jim. I don't want to talk about it. It brings me back bad memories.

10:06But it was not my finest hour. And yet you did make it to university. I did. To study geology. Thank God, yeah. They took a punt on me and they said, OK, we'll let you in. Presumably you turned over New Leaf I had turned, yes, it really did teach me a lesson and still one to this day that I live by. And what did your geology degree involve? Fieldwork in Scotland, lots of working in the labs. I really enjoyed looking at rocks under microscopes and that's really what got me into what I do now. While you were at university, you also joined the University Officer Training Corps. I did. Many male members of my family have been in the military over the years and I thought it would be a nice sort of activity to do and I really, really enjoyed it.

10:47And so you joined the rugby team there. Yes. And the tournament you were playing in changed the direction of your life. Tell me what happened. Yeah, it quite literally did. We were playing in the national tournament and I'd been having a blinder. I'd been spotted by the army rugby spotters to potentially join the main army team. And unfortunately, I tore my cruciate ligament in my left knee. I knew at the time it was so painful and I heard an audible crack. I thought, oh, my goodness, this isn't good. You had keyhole surgery to repair your knee, but that didn't go to plan. No, it didn't. Unfortunately, I was one of the few percent.

11:23My knee kept giving way. I was still in a lot of pain. I have to say it was pretty depressing. Because by this point, you were in the final summer of your four-year degree. Everyone else on your course was setting off around the world to do their geology fieldwork. But your knee held you back. It did. That must have been tough. It was tough. So I was waiting for the surgery, the major reconstructive surgery. So various suggestions were given to me. I was going to have to do something lab based. And I was like, do you want to do water sampling? Oh, no, it's boring. Don't want to do that. Various things.

11:53And then with great exasperation, eventually one of my lecturers said, well, what projects have you done this year that were really interesting? And I said, oh, we did something on meteorites and impacts. He went, ah, I know people at the Natural History Museum. And a couple of days later, he said, right, I've got you a job down at the museum in the summer and you're going to help classify meteorites. meteorites. So there you were at the Natural History Museum, which has since become your home, I guess, for many years. What was it like being there for the first time as a student? Oh, it was incredible.

12:20I mean, for me, it was this amazing cathedral to nature, but it was finding out what was going on downstairs in the basement, you know, where all the scientists are kept locked up. And to see the amazing research that was happening, there were 300 odd scientists doing cutting edge research on these collections. It was astounding. You're in your final year of your degree. What was the job you were given there? There were some meteorites that had been collected in Antarctica in the early 1990s and so I was classifying, so working out what type of meteorite supervised by Monica Grady. Past guest on this programme.

12:55Past guest on this programme and I fell in love with meteorites in that summer and I fell in love with the museum. And what did this classifying of these meteorites involve? The really exciting thing which I hadn't done at university was to use something called a scanning electron microscope and you can actually get the chemical composition of the minerals so I was taught how to use one of these which to us as students were these like mythical amazing instruments that only very highly qualified people are allowed to use but I was being allowed to use one as an undergraduate student. You have to take thin slices of these rocks.

13:27You do exactly so that the rock is so thin you can actually shine light through it they can actually look like stained glass windows. Well Caroline despite loving your time at the Natural History Museum you did have to go back to St Andrews to finish your degree but you weren't particularly keen on pursuing an academic career. Oh goodness no I have a great respect for academics but I was like no this is not the life for me. I actually really wanted to go into the airline industry following in my parents footsteps so I applied for graduate management trainee schemes which I was unsuccessful fill in.

13:59So then I applied to go in doing quite low level jobs thinking, well, if I'm any good, I can work my way up. I didn't even get those jobs. So I was thinking, oh my goodness, what am I going to do?

14:28Caroline Smith:up the grill with no antibiotics ever proteins and fresh produce. Savor the season. Shop Summer Fruit Fest at Whole Foods Market. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The July Savings Event from Apple Vacations is here. Book by July 23rd and save up to$400 off your flight and hotel package to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, Hawaii, or Europe. From all-inclusive escapes to bucket list adventures, Apple Vacations makes it easy to create memories with the people who Start today at AppleVacations.com or contact your trusted travel advisor.

15:09Enter your good friend Monica Grady. Enter Monica Grady, meteorite lady. At the time she was in fact head of the meteorite team at the Natural History Museum. She was, yes. And she managed to lure you back to geology. She did. She lured me and emotionally blackmailed me. So what happened was her husband worked at the Open University and Monica had formerly worked at the Open University. And she'd said, oh, why don't you come up to the OU and have a look around the labs? I think you'd be really interested. That might be a nice day out. Oh, yeah, that would be interesting. Thanks very much. So off I go to the Open University and meet various people and have a chat.

15:44And at the end of that, I was offered a PhD position. That was her plan all along. It was a trap. So I ended up at the Open University doing a PhD. So you started in 1998. What was the PhD on? I was looking at a type of meteorite that's quite unusual. What's weird about these meteorites is they contain a lot of carbon, a very important element for things like life. To this day, still nobody's really quite sure how these meteorites formed in the early solar system, but I was using lots of different chemical techniques to analyse them. Well, after your PhD, you're back at the Natural History Museum.

16:18You took up a research post there, but you began to realise that it wasn't just the scientific research that interested you. No, that's right. It was much wider. It was about these wonderful collections. You know, why do we have these collections? Where did they come from? What are we doing with them? And so I got very interested in the wider uses of the collection for societal benefit. And it was then I actually realised, you know, my dream job would be the curator of meteorites at the Natural History Museum. but this dream job of yours was then still held by Monica Grady it was how did that work out she's got the job that you really want she often say she's also like my work mum but I used to joke to her there's quite a lot of steep staircases in the museum and I used to sometimes say to her don't walk in front of me down the tower stairs Monica it'd be terrible if you had a terrible fall but we used to have a joke about that but obviously it was a complete joke your position at the National History Museum ended, you'd moved up to Glasgow to take up another research post.

17:14That's right. While you were there, I gather you're one of a team that pioneered a technique to study meteorites in a less invasive way. One of the things that we did was we used an instrument called a focused ion beam, an electron microscope, and you can take tiny, tiny samples. You need a microscope to even see the tiny sample that you've taken. and I suddenly realised that this was a really good way that you could study different types of meteorites. But I realised that this technique was actually really good for the samples because you could do the analyses without having to destroy the whole sample.

17:51Just taking a tiny bit of it. Just taking a tiny, tiny portion. You had only been in Glasgow barely a year when the position at the Natural History Museum came up. Yes, that's right and I did apply for it and I was very fortunate to be the successful candidate. And you didn't have to employ any dastardly tactics to move Monica on? No, in fact, I'm working with Monica at the moment on something and I can let you all know she's in rude health. She doesn't have to worry about me pushing her down the stairs. Well, Caroline Smith, just a few years into your role as curator, your interest broadened beyond meteorites falling on Earth to rock samples still out there in situ in space.

18:27How did that come about? I was at a meeting about how to prepare for a Mars sample return mission. So going to Mars with a rover, robot, picking pieces up and bringing them back to Earth. And then there was a question and answer session at the end, chaired by a very prominent UK scientist. And I put my hand up and I said, nobody's mentioned the things you need to put in place to be able to look after these samples when they come back from Mars. Have you got any comments? and I think it was fair to say I was sort of poo-pooed at that point but it obviously resonated because I then started getting phone calls from people saying we're doing this project, would you like to be involved?

19:04Well over the past decade and a half, Caroline, your work has taken you further into this field of space exploration. You've been working with different space agencies to study rocks being brought back from the moon, asteroids, those giant lumps of rock orbiting the sun and hopefully bringing samples back from Mars as well. You went on to lead a European team that created a roadmap for building a facility to curate samples that be returned to Earth from space missions. Yes, that was a major project, putting scientists and engineers together. And we did develop a very robust roadmap of the things that need to be put in place.

19:39I mean, you are not talking about a cheap building. You are talking, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, pounds, euros, whichever currency. But it's put Europe in a very, very strong position. and that's one of the reasons why we're able to partner, for example, with NASA in preparing for Mars sample return. What I don't quite understand is why it has to be so high tech, so expensive to build. You bring these samples back, surely you just make sure the humidity isn't too high, make sure the temperature's right? Yeah, but actually for Mars samples, because there is very strong evidence that Mars may have had life on it in the past, and indeed there may even be life today on Mars, you have to assume that samples you bring back could have something alive in them.

20:20So a micro bacteria, something like that. And you also have to assume that until you could prove otherwise that that sample is hazardous. So if you think about these labs that you see in science fiction films, it's that sort of level of laboratory. And has this facility been built yet? Not yet. There's some really interesting new technologies that actually could make this less challenging and therefore less costly. So I would say watch this space. Well, alongside your role looking after rock samples that come back from space, in 2014, you led a team of researchers and curators working with the European Space Agency on its Mars mission to make sure not only that the mission overall was successful, but the Mars rovers also worked as planned.

21:03That's right. So we worked with European Space Agency to develop a set of rocks from Earth that as closely as possible mimicked the sorts of physical properties and the chemical properties of the types of rocks that you find on Mars. And they could have a lot of these rocks and they could put them in an area and they could test, for example, that the wheels of the rover would work properly or that the drill could drill into these rocks. So that's actually proved to be a very successful project and is still being used now. On the 18th of February 2021, the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on Mars.

21:39How exciting a moment was that for you? It was exciting but nerve-wracking as well. I was watching the landing through the stream that was provided by NASA and there's like breaks in the communication but you can hear mission control saying everything is nominal. Is that a good word? That's a good word. Nominal is good. Non-nominal is not good. And yes, the rover landed beautifully and yeah, great sigh of relief. I understand that a month later during lockdown you had the chance to tell Her Late Majesty the Queen about the mission as part of British Science Week. I did so I'd had a slightly mysterious message from a colleague at the museum saying oh would you be happy to speak about the Mars rover so I said oh yes you know I'm in the team and then a few days later I think I've been out with the dog and my wife basically said Buckingham Palace have been on the phone they'd like to see whether you could speak to the late queen so yeah a few days later there i am with the late queen you know who i greatly admired in my kitchen on a zoom link on a zoom link it was one of those things it's typical we're expecting a delivery and so my wife was sitting at the bottom of the stairs holding on to the dog to grab the dog from going mental if the doorbell went off wonderful well four and a half years on the perseverance rover is still on mars what's the goal of this mission goal is to rove around analyse rocks in the Jezero crater but a key part of its mission is to actually collect interesting samples that we hope one day will be returned to Earth.

23:12And what do you hope to learn from any rocks that are collected that you don't know already from Martian meteorites? The thing with the Perseverance rover is we can choose exactly where those rock samples are taken from so we can look at the surrounding rocks we can look at interesting features so for example have they been deposited in water and then we can actually get some very very good data on those samples even before we bring them back to then actually study properly back in in labs on earth and why this place jezero crater it was a lake there was a lot of water there for a long time early in mars's history when we are confident that mars was nice and warm and wet had exactly the right conditions for life to start.

23:56So we think if we're going to find evidence of life that existed on Mars maybe four billion years ago, that's the sort of place you would want to go and have a look. And then how does the rover actually choose and collect samples? We use the cameras on the rover. They're like the rover's eyes to go and look at interesting rock features. The rover's got some amazing instruments on it, things that are basically like microscopes or like some of the stuff that I use in the labs where you can get the chemical information and you sort of zoom in and zoom in and you say wow that looks like a really interesting rock seal it in a nice tube and hopefully those tubes will come back to earth.

24:30Well the rover's still busy today. Very busy today. What's it been up to? So we've got 30 rock samples there's another six to collect there's lots of arguments about what those six are going to be some we have left on the surface of Mars already and the rest are still inside the rover waiting to be collected. And we can actually watch this all happening in real time online can't we? You can I mean it's not quite in real time because obviously we have to get the data back from the rover but yes NASA put all of their images and videos and things online you can also have a look at the reports about the rocks that we've collected so far.