Office of Science & Technology - Introducing Astrobiologist Pascale Ehrenfreund – Investigating How Life Began
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Introducing Astrobiologist Pascale Ehrenfreund – Investigating How Life Began Print E-mail
bridges vol. 25, April 2010 / News from the Network

By Magdalena Wirtl


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Pascale Ehrenfreund
"There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms being infinite in number ... are borne far out into space ... We must believe that in all worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world."
   -  the atomist philosopher Epicurus (c. 341-270 B.C) in a letter to Herodotus  

For centuries mankind has been struggling to answer the question of the origin of life. In present times, the fairly young interdisciplinary field of astrobiology is trying to shed some light on this complex question. One person who has investigated the subject extensively is Pascale Ehrenfreund, a professor of astrobiology at the University of Leiden and research professor of political science and international affairs at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University.


The making of an astrobiologist

In 1988, after obtaining her master's degree in molecular biology from the University of Vienna, Ehrenfreund attended the European Space Agency's (ESA's) summer school on fundamental physics. There she got introduced to the so-called "PAH hypothesis" that the astrophysicist Alain Léger had proven just a few years earlier: in 1985, Léger, along with Louis d'Hendecourt, detected for the first time polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in space. These complex organic molecules can also be found on Earth, where more often than not they are harmful - for example they are found in car exhausts, cigarette smoke, and grilled or charred meat, and can be carcinogenic. The detection of PAHs in space, however, was of tremendous importance for scientists, as these molecules are suspected to be the most abundant molecules in space. This discovery or, more precisely, the possibility of studying these molecules under space conditions, made Ehrenfreund decide to combine her chemistry knowledge with astrophysics and pursue her Ph.D. studies in astrophysics at the University of Paris VII under the supervision of Alain Léger.

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Asteroid 9826 Ehrenfreund 2114 T-3 orbits currently at 3.2 AU from the Sun (click image to enlarge).
After several postdoctoral fellowships at renowned organizations like ESA, Ehrenfreund was awarded the renowned APART (Austrian Program for Advanced Research and Technology) prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 1996, which enabled her to focus on her habilitation on "Cosmic Dust." Being one of the few women doing a habilitation in astrochemistry at that time, she was honored with a special gift - an asteroid bearing her name - "Asteroid 9826 Ehrenfreund 2114 T-3."

With her broad knowledge in molecular biology, astrophysics, and astrochemistry, moving into the new emerging field of astrobiology was just "a logical consequence of my previous career," Ehrenfreund remembers.

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