Advances in our Understanding of Life Excerpts from the
testimony of Jack D. Farmer, Director and Principal Investigator
of the NASA funded Astrobiology Program at Arizona State
University, for the "Life in the Universe" hearings before the
House Subcommiteee on Space and Aeronautics Over the past two
decades, advances in a number of scientific disciplines have
helped us better understand the nature and evolution of life on
Earth. These scientific developments also have helped lay the
foundation for astrobiology, opening up new possibilities for
the existence of life in the Solar System and beyond. A New Look
at Life Carl Woese of the University of Illinois published the
first universal tree of life in 1987. The universal tree is
based on genetic sequence comparisons, which showed that there
are three major domains - Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya. These
three domains consist of dozens of kingdoms, nearly all of which
are microbial. This is in contrast to the traditional five
kingdom view of the biosphere (Ani