NASA officials refused to accept the proposal. In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Levin claimed that they wouldn't fly it. He said: It's hard to change a paradigm. This experiment has been repeated thousands of times. It has never given false positives. It has never given false negatives.Dr. Levins' career also took him to Mars.Spherix developed a cheap way to make sweeteners that taste like sugar, is almost as sweet, and that are mostly free of calories. Tagatose is a sweetener that naturally occurs in small quantities in beets and milk. Clinical trials show that it can even be used as a drug for adult diabetes. Spherix was unable to manufacture it in sufficient quantities at a reasonable cost and attempts to have it approved for diabetes treatment have also failed.Dr. Levin spent a lot of his life trying find someone to make and sell tagatose. But he was no more successful with this than with his efforts at convincing people about life on Mars. Although tagatose was briefly used in Diet Pepsi Slurpees sold at 7-11, it never gained much market.Gilbert Victor Levin was the son of Henry and Lilian (Richman) Levin. He was born in Baltimore on April 23, 1924. His father, a Lithuanian immigrant who owned an antique shop, was his father. Gilbert Levin was a Johns Hopkins University student, but World War II interrupted him from his college education. He served three years in the Merchant Marine Radio Operator Corps before returning to Johns Hopkins University in 1946.In 1947, he earned his bachelor's degree as a civil engineer and in 1948, he received his master's degree as a sanitary engineer. He worked as a public-health engineer in Maryland, California, and Washington, D.C.He recalled the origins of the labeled-release experiment in a 2002 article in Johns Hopkins magazine. He was looking for a better method to detect microorganisms in water. The usual procedure was to place a sample in a broth containing nutrients. The standard procedure was to place the sample in a broth of nutrients. Microbes would consume the nutrients and create bubbles of carbon dioxide. Dr. Levin believed that if nutrients contained carbon-14 atoms a Geiger counter would detect radioactivity from decay of unstable carbon dioxide molecules well before bubbles.Dr. Levin was able to demonstrate that his method works thanks to the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1955, he co-founded Resources Research Inc., an environmental consulting company. He then returned to Johns Hopkins in 1963, where he received a doctorate of environmental engineering.
