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THIS is the story of the remarkable 40-year friendship and scientific collaboration between the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and the Sri Lankan mathematician and astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe.

Their first encounter was well before they joined forces at the University of Cambridge. It goes back to the time that Hoyle was an external examiner to the University of Ceylon, judging Wickramasinghe鈥檚 final examination papers.

Collaboration ended with the death of Hoyle, aged 86, in 2001. During that time, the pair had published papers on a bewildering range of subjects, from the triggering of ice ages by comet dust to the evolutionary origins of racism. The work they are most famous for is their painstaking building of the case for a cosmic origin of life.

Wickramasinghe and Hoyle鈥檚 picture of a galaxy teeming with life is a stunning one. Equally stunning is their naivety in imagining that an idea that tipped the biological orthodoxy into a terminal tailspin would not provoke fury from the scientific establishment. Depressingly, scientists are human beings with all the failings of human beings.

Wickramasinghe records the triumphs of their ideas, such as the prediction that the nucleus of Halley鈥檚 comet would be black with organic molecules rather than the snowy white in the prevailing view. He also records instances when the community came round to their ideas and, perhaps inevitably, wrote the pair out of the history books. Hoyle was scandalously cheated out of the Nobel prize for another piece of work 鈥� the cosmic synthesis of the elements.

The scientific community has come a long way towards Hoyle and Wickramasinghe鈥檚 position, wholeheartedly embracing the idea of planetary panspermia. It has yet to accept cosmic panspermia, however.

Fittingly, Wickramasinghe鈥檚 A Journey with Fred Hoyle has a foreword by the Sri Lanka-based science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. This is not to imply that cosmic panspermia is science fiction; the case is simply not yet proved or disproved. But who would bet against it? For as Byron said: 鈥淭ruth is always strange; stranger than fiction.鈥�