The relentless heat cooks the Badwater region of California's Death Valley so thoroughly that some expanses are textured like dry serpent skin. At some 284 feet below sea level--North America's lowest point--it is perhaps the hottest place on the surface of the earth: the temperature once peaked at a record 53.01 degrees Celsius (127.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Out here, blood-pumping mammals are scarce. It may seem unfitting to find a Nobel Prize winner, renowned for hepatitis B work, in this scorching pit. But Baruch S. Blumberg's latest challenge takes him beyond human subjects. As the first director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Astrobiology Institute (NAI), he is searching for extreme life-forms, the kind the space agency aims to someday find on other worlds.

"I always liked the idea of doing fieldwork, exploring, going out and finding new things," Blumberg says back at NAI headquarters, which is nestled near Silicon Valley at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. Out of his desert garb, the outdoors-loving Blumberg looks a good decade younger than his 75 years. At the job only since last September, Blumberg is trying to marshal gaggles of astronomers, chemists, ecologists, geologists, biologists, physicists and even zoologists. He is convinced that advances in molecular biology, space exploration and other endeavors make timely the reexamination of such age-old issues as the origins of life and its possible existence elsewhere.

   
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