Two influential groups in the world of astrobiology with decidedly different focuses came together in July for a joint conference reflecting the ever-more-interdisciplinary nature of the field.

The gathering in Montpellier, France was sponsored by International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL), which has long focused on pre-biotic chemistry and the origins of life, and the Bioastronomy Commission of the International Astronomical Union, which has a more astronomical focus. The result was a seven-day conference where all the sessions were held in one main hall – meaning that the chemists listened to the presentations about the interstellar medium and exoplanets, and the astronomers learned about the latest discoveries regarding the early RNA world and synthetic biology.

“Having everyone together for all the presentations was different and probably a little unusual for some,” said astrochemist Pascale Ehrenfreund of the Leiden University in the Netherlands, who is an officer in both organizations. “In other big astrobiology meetings, people tend to go to the parallel sessions in their respective fields, but here that didn’t happen. Our impression is that the mixing worked quite well.”

William Irvine, president of Bioastronomy, a professor of astronomy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a Co-Investigator at the NASA Goddard Center for Astrobiology, said the conference both illustrated the interdisciplinary nature of astrobiology and pushed it forward.

“It’s becoming better understood that the origins of life community and the astronomy community have a lot to offer each other,” Irvine said. “Astronomers look at planet formation, and what we learn affects thinking about the early Earth, and that affects thinking about the origins of life. But biology changes the planet, and work in the origins of life field explores that and helps with understanding what biosignatures we should look for on exoplanets.”

Conference co-chairs Muriel Gargaud of the University of Bordeaux and Robert Pascal of the University of Montpellier said the joint conference reflected another reality: That with so many astrobiology conferences now scheduled around the world, the funds to put them on and attend them have been squeezed. In the past, ISSOL and Bioastronomy often had conferences the same year, and that became something of a burden for people who wanted to attend both. In 2002, for instance, ISSOL had a June conference in Mexico and Bioastronomy had its conference in Australia one week later.

Pascal said that it made sense to have the conference in France because the divide there between origin-of-life chemistry and bioastronomy had never been strong, and so it was easy to provide an environment where both were valued.

The Montpellier area of southern France was an especially appropriate setting for the conference, Pascal said, because the first important carbonaceous chondrite to be found fell in 1804 on the city of Alais (or Ales), about 60 kilometers from Montpellier. The Alais chondrite (an especially important family of meteorites) was determined in 1834 to contain organic carbon, ushering in new understandings of how the carbon essential for life could be delivered to Earth. Pascal said that the chondrites were a good example of how origin-of-life chemistry and bioastronomy overlapped, since they are important to both fields.

Among the invited lecturers were Nobel Laureate Ada Yonath of Isreal’s Weizmann Institute, who spoke about the formation of peptide bonds from early RNA, and Gerald Joyce, who discussed his efforts at Scripps Research Institute to produce synthetic RNA that can sustain themselves and evolve in a Darwinian fashion. In addition, Franck Selsis of the University of Bordeaux discussed terrestrial planets within the habitable zone orbiting red dwarf stars and Kevin Hand of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory described the possibility of ocean worlds on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

ISSOL is the older of the two groups, having grown out of the excitement about origins of life discoveries associated with Stanley Miller, Alexander Oparin and Cyril Ponnamperuma. Formally established in 1973, its terrestrial focus gradually shifted with the exploration for possible extraterrestrial life coming from NASA missions to Mars and beyond. At the 2005 ISSOL meeting in Beijing, organizers concluded that the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of origin-of-life research, as well as the growing sophistication of astrobiology as a field, required a name change. The group became ISSOL, The International Astrobiology Society.

In 1982, the organization “Bioastronomy: Search for Extraterrestrial Life,” officially became Commission 51 of the International Astronomical Union, the world’s leading astronomy organization. Commission 51 began with a focus primarily on the SETI effort to detect radio transmissions of extraterrestrial origins, but now also focuses on the search for life or past life in the solar system, the nature of planetary systems around other stars, understanding molecules in interstellar space associated with biology, and how spectroscopy can be used to detect evidence of biological activity on exoplanets.

Conferences like the one in Montpellier are not just important for groups such as ISSOL and Bioastronomy, they are their primary reasons for being. Previous efforts to bring the two together had failed, but the joint conference was approved at a 2008 meeting in Florence. Approximately 600 people attended the Montpellier conference, coming from all over the world.

An idea that surfaced and was discussed during the conference was to establish an international network of astrobiology organizations, now that they exist in so many nations. Ehrenfreund said the field could use an organization that helps groups communicate internationally, but Irvine said the idea is still in a formative phase with differing views presented.

Carl Pilcher, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute and a participant at the conference, summed up the event as good for astrobiology.

“Since astrobiology is all about bringing diverse communities together, having these two communities commit to a common meeting was a big step forward for astrobiology internationally,” he said. “The fact that they committed to another joint meeting, in Nara, Japan in 2014, also means that this integration across the community will continue into the future.  This is all good news.”