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Dr Levin met T. Keith Glennan, NASA’s first administrator, at a Christmas party and asked if the space agency, which was recently created at the time, was interested in researching life on Mars. He came up with the idea of the labeled release experiment, and NASA began funding its development.
After the sale of his consulting company, Dr. Levin worked at Hazelton Laboratories in Vienna, Virginia. In 1967 he was offered a professorship at Colorado State University, but instead founded Biospherics Research, which he later renamed Spherix. Tagatose was supposed to be the company’s successful project, but success never came.
“He lost control of the company when a large part of the board took over the company,” said Henry Levin.
Spherix, now known as Alkido Pharma, ditched tagatose and moved on to starting other companies, like using artificial intelligence to develop new drugs.
In addition to his son Henry, Dr. Levin, who had homes in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and Palm Beach, Florida, is survived by another son, Ron; one daughter, Carol Sanchez; and six grandchildren. His wife, Karen, died in 2019.
What Dr. Levin’s Mars experiment did or did not discover remains unsolved.
“He has taken a big step forward,” said James L. Green, NASA chief scientist. “He got us thinking, well, what could that be?”
A real answer awaits the return of rock and soil samples from Mars that NASA’s new Perseverance rover will soon begin collecting. But Perseverance has no way of returning the samples to Earth. The mission to collect and bring them back is still on the drawing board, and scientists will only be able to examine these samples in the 2030s.
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