Chandra Wickramasinghe: Panspermia, and the Cosmic Origins of Life

With the rapid growth of new evidence from astronomy, space science and biology that supports the theory of life as a cosmic rather than terrestrial phenomenon, this book discusses a set of crucial data and pictures showing that life is still arriving at our planet. Although it could spark controversy among the most hardened sceptics this book will have an important role in shaping future science in this area.

We are led to believe that modern science is free of all forms of irrational prejudice that plagued science over the centuries. In this book we document an instance when this is far from true in relation to the most fundamental aspects of biology — the question of the origin of life and its cosmic provenance. From the early 1980’s evidence in favour of the theory of cosmic life and a version of panspermia, developed by Fred Hoyle and CW has grown to the point that its continued marginalisation, or even outright rejection, is a cause for serious concern. We present here the story of panspermia in which we ourselves have been directly involved…

Milton Wainwright, BSc, PhD, FRAS was born in 1950 in the mining village of Fitzwilliam in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He obtained his BSc and PhD from Nottingham University, and after a short period as a National Research Council of Canada Research Fellow became lecturer in Environmental Microbiology at the University of Sheffield. Here, he taught and researched for forty-two years in the Departments of Microbiology and Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. He is an Honorary Professor at the Universities of Cardiff and Buckingham, UK, the University of Ruhuna, Sri, Lanka, and the Slavic University of North Macedonia; he is also a Visiting Professor of King Saud University, Riyadh, and one of the few biologists to be made a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He has published widely on the history of science, particularly on the germ theory, the history of antibiotics (notably penicillin) and alternative accounts of the history of natural selection and evolution.

Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe, MBE, BSc (Ceylon), MA, PhD, ScD (Cantab), Hon DSc (Sri Lanka, Ruhuna), Hon DLitt (Tokyo, Soka), FRAS, FRSA was born in 1939 in Sri Lanka. He commenced work in Cambridge on his PhD degree under the supervision of the late Sir Fred Hoyle, and published his first scientific paper in 1961 He was awarded a PhD degree in Mathematics in 1963 and was elected a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge in the same year. In the following year he was appointed a Staff Member of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge where he remained until 1973. He was formerly a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge and Staff Member of the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge; Formerly Professor and Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, UK; Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology, University of Buckingham, UK; Honorary Professor, University of Buckingham; Honorary Professor University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka; Honorary Professor, Sir John Kotelawala Defence University of Sri Lanka; Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Fundamental Studies, Sri Lanka. He has also held visiting Professorial appointment in the US, Canada and Japan and Sri Lanka over the past four decades. Professor Wickramasinghe has published over 350 papers in major scientific journals, some sixty in the journal Nature. Together with the late Sir Fred he pioneered the theory of cometary panspermia the evidence for which has become compelling over the past few years. Finally, he is also the author/co-author of over thirty-five books.

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