Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe MBE (born 20 January 1939) is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician, astronomer[1] and astrobiologist of Sinhalese ethnicity.

[8] Wickramasinghe has written more than 40 books about astrophysics and related topics;[9] he has made appearances on radio, television and film, and he writes online blogs and articles.

[10][11] He has an association with Daisaku Ikeda, president of the Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai International, that led to the publication of a dialogue with him, first in Japanese and later in English, on the topic of Space and Eternal Life.

He was a Visiting By-Fellow, Churchill College, Cambridge, England 2015/16;[15] Professor and Director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham, a post he has held since 2011;[9] Affiliated Visiting Professor, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka;[17] and a board member and research director at the Institute for the Study of Panspermia and Astroeconomics, Ogaki-City, Gifu, Japan.

[19] In 1960 he commenced work in Cambridge on his PhD degree under the supervision of Fred Hoyle, and published his first scientific paper "On Graphite Particles as Interstellar Grains" in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1962.

Here he continued to work on the nature of interstellar dust, publishing many papers in this field,[21] that led to a consideration of carbon-containing grains as well as the older silicate models.

Their publications on books and papers[21] arguing for panspermia and a cosmic hypothesis of life are controversial and, in particular detail, essentially contra the scientific consensus in both astrophysics and biology.

Throughout his career, Wickramasinghe, along with his collaborator Fred Hoyle, has advanced the panspermia hypothesis, that proposes that life on Earth is, at least in part, of extraterrestrial origin.

[38][41] The most contentious issue around the Hoyle–Wickramasinghe model of the panspermia hypothesis is the corollary of their first two propositions that viruses and bacteria continue to enter the Earth's atmosphere from space, and are hence responsible for many major epidemics throughout history.

[46][47] On 20 January 2001 the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) conducted a balloon flight from Hyderabad, India to collect stratospheric dust from a height of 41 km (135,000 ft) with a view to testing for the presence of living cells.

In 2005 the ISRO group carried out a second stratospheric sampling experiment from 41 km altitude and reported the isolation of three new species of bacteria including one that they named Janibacter hoylei sp.nov.

[citation needed] The rocks were sent to the University of Cardiff in Wales for analysis, where Chandra Wickramasinghe's team analyzed them and claimed that they contained extraterrestrial diatoms.

[64] Experts in diatoms complemented the statement, saying that the organisms found in the rock represented a wide range of extant terrestrial taxa, confirming their earthly origin.

[62] Wickramasinghe and collaborators responded, using X-ray diffraction, oxygen isotope analysis, and scanning electron microscope observations, in a March 2013 paper asserting that the rocks they found were indeed meteorites,[65] instead of being created by lightning strikes on Earth as stated by scientists from the University of Peradeniya.

[72] Wickramasinghe and his mentor Fred Hoyle have also used their data to argue in favor of cosmic ancestry,[73][74][75][76][77][78] and against the idea of life emerging from inanimate objects by abiogenesis.