Well, the other thing that I tried to do was to go on the field trips because I felt that was the kind of heart of it and then, you know, I liked field trips, and most of the field trips I'd done before were, you know, with patients or with populations so it's kind of indoors; you get to some exotic place and then you go into hospital. But most of the fieldwork in astrobiology was in harsh environments actually, because one of the things that we were most interested in was extremophiles, that is, organisms that live in what we think of — humans think of — as pretty extreme, the organisms think it's great — if they think. But because that would have been the environment of early Earth and we wanted to understand that, and that would have been the environment on early Mars which was the strong candidate, one of the strong candidates still, for other places with life in our solar system. So we would often go to geothermal sites or, you know… or… but the places I went to were fascinating. One of the most interesting there, I went to a place called Devon Island, which is in the Princess [sic] Elizabeth Islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Okay, so that's 75 degrees north, the only big island north of there is Ellesmere, and you’re… you're just at the same latitude as northern Greenland, and there's a big impact crater there, the Haughton crater and Devon Island's uninhabited. It was briefly inhabited some years ago but it's a very harsh climate; stormy, you know, cold, not much snow, you know, there's not much, as you know, there’s not much snow on the Arctic littoral because the Arctic Ocean is covered by ice so far and as a consequence it's… it’s very… the humidity is very low so you get very little rainfall and very little… and not much snow, but whatever falls stays there. The rain stays because there's permafrost that doesn't drain, and up until now, in the… if you go to the Arctic littoral in the… in the summer, you don't see much snow because it melts. As soon as you get much more rain, even if the climate gets warmer… I'm sorry, as soon as you… if the ice pack covering the Arctic Ocean thins — as it is, by the way, as you know — or disappears, it's the prediction, it may actually disappear in forty years, then you get a lot more rain, that means the snow's going to build up or remain in the… over the summer, that's how you get an Ice Age. You get glaciers flowing south, they build, build, build until they get big enough and high enough and heavy enough and they start… they start moving south. So that's one of the consequences, which oddly isn't talked about much, of… of the thinning of the ice.

[Q] Has global warming affected the ability of your scientists to do their experiments?

Not really because, you know, they're studying what's happening, you know, at the time. A lot of what they do relates to the global warming… global warming issue and, of course, NASA maintains the surveyance, you know, it was a… it was a… using NASA satellites, that the ozone hole was discovered in the South Pole, and in the North Pole as well by the way, and now they've just… they've just… orbited a satellite that can measure the thickness of ice, up until… before that, there's a radar… you can look to some depth with radar, prior to that, you actually had to go and measure it so there was spotty information, but now there should be, you know, world or polar wide value measurement. It’s going to provide some incredible data. So that was a fascinating place and we had to fly in, land in, you know, in a twin Beaver and there's no airfield there but there's a kind of windswept plateau where they can land one of these twin engine Canadian planes, that are really amazing. But you… they wouldn't land if the wind velocity was more than about 12 knots, and the average wind velocity is 20, so, you know, if you landed, I… I was there and I… there was a plane going out and so I decided to take that after I'd been there a few days, and the next plane they couldn't land for another two weeks. But it… but that was a fascinating site and a lot of interesting research happening; exposure to UV light, you know, constant UV in the summer, a very important issue.