Dozens of members of the scientific community have contributed their thoughts, memories, and ideas to this enterprise, corrected and recorrected large chunks of text, and, in a very real sense, turned this book into a community project. They also made writing it a lot more fun than its first author had anticipated.
Roger Summons, John Hayes, Keith Kvenvolden, Kai Hinrichs, Marcus Elvert, and David Ward contributed above and beyond the call of duty, answering endless questions, pointing out research papers we had missed, and reading and commenting on multiple drafts of various chapters and figures. James Maxwell, Pierre Albrecht, Joan Grimalt, Jaap Sinninghe Damsté, Stefan Schouten, Jan de Leeuw, and Simon Brassell all spent hours explaining their work and its genesis, often commenting on long chapters of the manuscript and responding cheerfully to our persistent queries and challenges.
One of the most enjoyable interludes of this project for Susan was the weekend spent in Strasbourg at the invitation of Guy Ourisson. His enthusiasm, insight, wisdom, and passion for science inform this entire volume. Mandy Joye’s infective excitement about the bizarre “bugs” she studies, perhaps aided by the free-flowing after-dinner wine at the Hanse Institute where she and Susan met, provided the impetus for the extensive microbiology chapter. Without Mandy’s inspiration and encouragement, Susan probably would not have undertaken it. Antje Boetius also commented on portions of this text, offering crucial corrections and updates.
John Sargent, Pat Parker, Richard Evershed, Mike Moldowan, John Volkman, Walter Michaelis, Jeff Bada, Stu Wakeham, Steve Rowland, John Jasper, Ellen Hopmans, Paul Farrimond, Richard Pancost, Archie Douglas, Dick Hamilton, Paul Philp, Chris Reddy, Tim Eglinton, Colin Pillinger, and Artur Stankiewicz all supplied us with reprints and literature lists when requested, and provided thoughtful answers to our questions about their work or corrected excerpts from the book, often at length.
We hope Echoes of Life offers some reward for their time and attention, without which it would surely be riddled with errors, large and small. That some errors remain seems almost unavoidable in a work of this breadth, but we hope such errors are small, and whether large or small, we know they are our own.
Thanks are due to the Organizing Committee of the Twenty-first International Meeting on Organic Geochemistry in Krakow, with special thanks to Artur Stankiewicz for facilitating Susan Gaines’s attendance. Thanks also to Mark McCaffrey for arranging her attendance at the 2002 Gordon Conference on Organic Geochemistry, where the three authors gathered for the first time to discuss ideas for this book.
We would also like to thank Tim Knowles and Pete Smith for turning Geoff’s sketches into the finished cartoons that adorn the chapter bibliographies at the end of the book, and Stephan Leibfried for serving as a nonscientist guinea pig for some of the figures and random bits of text. Geoff wishes to express his great indebtedness to his wife, Pam, for her patience and forbearance during the many hours he spent hidden away in his study, and we all wish to thank her for answering his pleas for “a little typing” as it occasionally spared us from having to decipher his handwritten notes. We are grateful to Ellen Immergut, a political scientist who became intrigued by the book’s concept while she and Susan were fellows at the Hanse, and her father, Edmund Immergut, who directed it quickly and painlessly to its home at Oxford University Press while it was still, in fact, little more than a concept.
Without the support of the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study in Delmenhorst, this book would not exist. The Hanse provided generous fellowships and infrastructure for Susan and Geoff, and furnished the three of us with a comfortable meeting place for the first year of work. Its library retrieval service was essential, as it provided easy access to the old papers that much of the first half of the book relies on. The Hanse brings together a dynamic, international mix of scientists and scholars from different disciplines, and our spontaneous evening gatherings and conversations helped to shape this book in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways.