No, to be accurate, there wasn’t anything to do with “past” biological activity, LR detected biological activity in the soil samples, or (as was claimed at the time, in order to avoid A) a PR firestorm from people who would refuse to accept the results and B) the end of human missions to other celestial bodies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_spacecraft_biological_experiments#Labeled_Release
http://mars.spherix.com/mars.html
or (as was claimed at the time... [whoops, omitted] discovered completely unknown chemical reactions which couldn’t be reproduced and which left no byproducts or other traces).
“Nonetheless, on 12 April 2012, an international team of scientists reported studies, based on mathematical speculation through complexity analysis of the Labeled Release experiments of the 1976 Viking Mission, that may suggest the detection of “extant microbial life on Mars.”
They could not rxplain the chemical reaction; ergo it was not proof of life. But they later found a research team willing to make a “mathematical speculation” (like the ICCP global warming model) “that may” (as in “might”) “suggest” (as is in propose the “possibility of”) extant microbial life.
Ergo - they did NOT find evidence of microbial life. They found a mathematical speculation that proposed the possibility (could be other possibilities too) that they found evidence of life.
as in the conclussions they said:
“so detecting no trace of any organic compound on the surface of Mars came as a surprise”
“Most researchers surmise that the results of the Viking biology experiments can be explained by purely chemical processes that do not require the presence of life, and the GC-MS results rule out life.”
“Despite the positive result from the Labeled Release experiment, a general assessment is that the results seen in the four experiments are best explained by oxidative chemical reactions with the Martian soil. One of the current conclusions is that the Martian soil, being continuously exposed to UV light from the Sun (Mars has no protective ozone layer), has built up a thin layer of a very strong oxidant. A sufficiently strong oxidizing molecule would react with the added water to produce oxygen and hydrogen, and with the nutrients to produce carbon dioxide”
and then the article descends into contesting new arguments over the same evidence - theories - but as yet NOT verifiable and verified evidence