Meet: Jack Farmer
Exobiologist
Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, California

Photo taken by Michael Milstein, Billings Gazette

My Career Journey

The week before I started college I sat down with my dad to talk about my plans. He suggested I should choose a major before leaving for school and that it should be something I really enjoyed. I distinctly remember him saying: "You know son, whatever you choose, you will have to be doing that everyday for the rest of your life, so you'd better enjoy it!" It is possible to make career changes later on in life, but basically I think my dad's advice was pretty much right on! When I asked my dad what he thought I would be good at, he said: "Ever since I can remember, you have been interested in rocks. You and your mom wouldn't let me go past a riverbed without stopping during our drives in the country. You have an uncle who used to work with rocks...I think he called himself a geologist."

So the next week I headed off to school to meet with my counselor and asked if she knew about a major for geologists. She said yes, so I declared my major the first semester and never looked back. I've never regretted my decision. Geology is so broad and interdisciplinary; I've moved around a lot within the field during my career. I started out in volcanology, moved to geochemistry for awhile, then to statistics, on to paleontology, and am now working in planetary science. Interesting thing is, I continue to use most all of that background, even in the work I'm doing now!

According to my mother, I collected my first rock when I was six years old. By the time I was 10, my collection was so big I had to give a lot of rocks away when we moved. My mom encouraged me by providing empty egg cartons for storing my samples, and by helping me identify my rocks, minerals and fossils. She even bought me my first geology books-- "The First Book of Stones," "All About our Changing Rocks" and "How to Know the Minerals and Rocks"-- and took me to my first geology meeting, a giant rock and minerals show in Los Angeles. In short, I was hooked early! My nickname in high school was "Stoney."

I received a Ph.D. in Paleontology from the University of California at Davis in 1978. Shortly after finishing my degree, I was employed as museum scientist by the Geology Department at Davis. My job was to assemble collections of minerals, rocks and fossils to help teach courses in geology and paleontology and to support the research being carried out by the faculty. During my time at Davis, I learned a lot about how to classify natural materials and also a lot about how nature is organized. While a museum scientist, I also taught courses in geology and paleontology. My favorite was a field course in marine paleoecology (study of the ecology of fossil life). I taught this course at the university's marine station at Bodega Bay, in northern California. The course lasted six weeks and my students were able to go out to the field almost everyday and observe and carry out experiments on living marine communities. We tried to understand not only living creatures, but how they become fossilized. In the second half of the course we visited many different places in California where we could study the fossil record of marine life and reconstruct how the ancient marine species lived and interacted.

After five years as museum scientist I decided to try another career and left Davis to join Exxon as a petroleum geologist. My job with Exxon was to find oil. I focused my search on the offshore marine areas of southern California. Using many different methods that enable geologists to visualize the study of rocks underground, I was able to determine the most likely places to drill for oil and gas. It was exciting and during my five-year stay with Exxon I found between five and 10-million barrels of oil.

After leaving the petroleum industry I returned to academics. Although I enjoyed finding oil, I really missed teaching. I was able to land a job teaching Oceanography, Earth Science and Paleontology in the Dept. of Earth and Space Sciences at UCLA in southern California. I was there for five years and during that time also developed my present interests in the very early history of life and the solar system. This brought me to NASA in 1991 on a research fellowship from the National Research Council. The project I came to NASA to do focused on developing methods to better interpret the fossil record of very small microorganisms. It was quite a change from my early years as a paleontologist where I focused on larger organisms with hard skeletons of bone or shell. Now I had to worry about how very small organisms with no skeletons could become fossils.

In August 1998, I left NASA Ames to accept a new position as Professor of Geology at Arizona State University in Tempe. The decision to leave NASA was a tough one. But the call to return to teaching was also great. Since moving to Arizona State I have helped to start a new NASA-funded program in Astrobiology. Astrobiology is described by NASA as an emerging science that seeks to understand the origin, evolution, distribution and destiny of life in the universe. That is a tall order and will require the cooperation of a many different types of scientists-- Astrobiology is very interdisciplinary by nature.

Part of my job in overseeing the Astrobiology Program at ASU is to help promote interactions between scientists in different fields and to help create new opportunities for students to train and study in this new area of science. This has been very challenging, but also very rewarding! Several of us in the Astrobiology group at ASU are actively involved with NASA programs and the current and planned missions to Mars and Europa. I am hoping that we will make some important breakthroughs on questions about life's origin, early evolution and possible existence elsewhere in the solar system in the next few years.

Where I Am Today

My studies at NASA have lead me in several directions. An important part of my research deals with the origin of stromatolites, which are thin-layered sedimentary structures that are produced by communities of microorganisms. But I have also been interested in how some of the tiny microbes that create stromatolites become fossils. This summer I joined a group of other scientists to look at the oldest known stromatolites which are found in western Australia. These fossils are dated at almost 3.5 billion years old! (If you are fuzzy on how big a billion is, it's a one followed by nine zeros. That's a lot of years!). In rocks in the same area that are about the same age, we have found tiny microfossils that indicate that microbial life was both diverse and abundant by that time. The most interesting questions for me are: What was the environment like where these organisms lived? What did the organisms do for a living? How were they fossilized and why? By understanding such things we can learn more about the ancient biosphere and environments of the early Earth, and also improve our chances of finding evidence of ancient life in rocks on other planets like Mars.

I'm still working on these problems. It turns out that on the present Earth, microorganisms tend to thrive in extreme environments; places that are either too hot, too cold, or too salty or acidic for larger complex organisms. I have looked at bacterial life and their fossils in lots of extreme environments. But in trying to better understand how the earliest communities lived, I have mostly focused on life at high temperatures, that is, on microbes that live in hot springs found in places like Yellowstone National Park. I have spent the last five summers in Yellowstone trying to learn more about how the high-temperature communities survive, interact and become fossils. This is important for interpreting the fossil record of early life on Earth. We believe that the last common ancestor of all living species on Earth lived at very high temperatures. We think this is so because when we compare the genetic material (DNA and RNA) in all living things, we can make a "tree of life" that shows how things are related. Turns out that the most primitive things, that is, the species that occur near the trunk of the tree, are all high-temperature bacteria, most of which live in hot springs and geysers. So these are good places to go to find conditions similar to what prevailed on the early Earth.

But the story doesn't end there. Because hot springs are such good places to fossilize microorganisms, these environments are also natural places to explore for fossil life on Mars. So, we have also been looking at images of the surface of Mars for the most likely spots for ancient hot-spring deposits. If we can find such deposits, we will want to go there and bring rocks back from those places to look for microfossils. This is in our present plan for Mars exploration, and has been really given a boost by the recent claims of possible life in the Martian meteorite, ALH84001, which was found in Antarctica. Although I do not think this rock from Mars has definitive evidence of life, it does have carbonate minerals (lime) that we think were formed in much the same way carbonate minerals are forming in some Yellowstone hot springs. NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission in 2003 and 2005 will go to Mars and look for just those types of rocks. The rocks we find will then be collected using a robotic rover and brought to Earth in a sample return spacecraft. Once we have the samples here, we can get a closer look using a whole series of lab instruments that are to large or powerful to take to Mars because of the costs involved. We hope that with this new we will be in a better position answer the question, "Did life ever get started on Mars?"

The Best and Worst of my Job

The best thing about my job is the excitement of exploring ancient worlds, either on Earth by looking back in time at old rocks, or in space by looking at old planetary surfaces or the planetary materials brought to the Earth as meteorites. My job is also fun because of all the fascinating people I meet, and the interesting seminars and discussions we have every week. I very much enjoy teaching and workjng with students on research projects. But I think the best part of my job is probably the field work. It's wonderfully challenging to go out into the field and try and reconstruct past events from the meager clues provided in the rocks. But it is also great fun to bring samples back to the lab and tease out more clues using the microscope and other tools. Sometimes I feel like I'm Sherlock Holmes solving a crime. I have often thought, if I ever stopped doing geology, I would like to try forensics. The thought processes seem very similar.

What do I like the least? Working for a large bureaucracy like the federal government can be quite frustrating at times. Sometimes you feel like the system is designed to prevent your progress. When I was with NASA, traveling or buying materials for my work was really involved because of all the paperwork and legal restrictions. That is easier for me at ASU, although I depend a lot on NASA for research funding and sometimes the money to support the work is slow in coming. Another downside of my work is the need to travel a lot. As a field-oriented geologist, you must go where the interesting rocks are and that is almost always somewhere else. That means time away from home and family, which I don't like.

When I was a Kid

I enjoyed being outside and really liked nature a lot. My room while I was growing up looked like a museum. I guess it still does. My wife calls my part of the house the "Smithsonian Wing" in honor of all the wonderful things I have collected over the years.

The book that really got me interested in science was "How to Know the Minerals and Rocks." But there were lots of other "How to Know..." books and I read most all of them. I also read a lot in areas other than science, like all the Zane Grey classics and books about animals. In particular, I liked to read about horses and had my own library of classic stories like "The Black Stallion." We did not have much money, so a lot of my books came from the Salvation Army. I did partcipate in science projects at school but most of my projects were just for fun at home. Being in the country most of my life, I raised lots of animals, including fish, frogs, snakes, pigeons, chickens, horses, cows, pigs; you name it, and I probably took care of it at some point. (That's probably why I don't have any pets today, although I think I would enjoy having an iguana named Heathcliff or a turtle named Horatio Hornblower if I could convince my wife!)

Job Preparation

I took all the science I could in school and my books were some of my best friends growing up, and they helped me maintain my interest and growth in science. But, because I did not have the advantage of going to good schools with strong science programs, I mostly motivated myself to go to the library by inventing projects. For example, when I was 10, I went through a phase where I became very interested in birds. At that point, I started my bird book project which lasted two years. It was a three-ring binder filled with every picture and every fact I could find about birds. I had pages of envelopes with feathers, and even spent time at the zoo taking pictures with my Kodak Brownie camera of exotic birds. Sometimes the zoo keeper would give me feathers that he saved when he cleaned the cages, which ended up in my book. My friends called me "bird brain," but it didn't bother me much. I liked my project and learned a lot.

Influences

My biggest inspiration was my mom. Both literally and figuratively she "egged me on" to collect my rocks (she provided the egg cartons to house my collection!) and then helped me identify them. She always encouraged me to pursue my interest in nature and to read the right books. She even tolerated my museum/room with all the creepy crawlies that were in there (or in my pockets come laundry time!).

Personal

I am married and my wife Maria is a faculty member and webmaster in the Geography Dept. at Arizona State University. (She is only two buildings away from where I work so we have lunch together almost every day.) In her spare time, she is also the educational outreach coordinator for the new Astrobiology Program we have started at ASU. We live in Scottsdale, Arizona, about 30 minutes from the ASU campus and are located about two hours south of the Grand Canyon (geologist's paradise!).

The biggest change for us since moving from California is the weather. We now live in the Sonoran Desert and it can be very hot in the summer. Even though it is hot here in the summer, most of the rest of the year the weather is nearly perfect and that is when most people do outdoor activities. In fact, lots of people come to the Phoenix area in the winter to golf (we call them "snow birds").

My hobbies are playing the guitar and writing music. I used to perform in bands a lot, but now I more often enjoy listening. I am one-quarter Native American and enjoy studying the history and culture of my tribes, the Cherokee and Chickasaw. I like American Indian crafts and recently made my first rawhide drum. I try to play it in the morning to keep it "tuned." I am also learning to play the Native American flute and hope to dance in my first pow-wow next year when I have finished making my new outfit.

I have a son, Brett, who graduated from California State University in Chico with a degree in Business and Economics. He is now working as a stock broker in Sacramento. The only other rock hounds in my family are my two nieces, April and Angela, who live with their mother (my sister) and my mom in Live Oak, California. They are growing up fast and its hard to tell if they have the kind of interest in geology that I had when I was their age. Still, I have fun going through their egg cartons of rocks and helping them identify their samples. We have been on many collecting trips, usually to the riverbed. Amazing how history repeats itself!

Archived Chats with Jack Farmer

• September 1, 1999
• December 10, 1998
• July 24, 1997
• November 20, 1996