In the 1990s I met Fred Hoyle after a lecture he gave on panspermia and life originating from outside the earth and I found him a totally engaging and extremely intelligent individual. He even autographed one of his books on astronomy for me that I took along to his lecture.

Furthermore, I think that Fred Hoyle's scientific achievements were never fully recognized when he and his colleagues^ weren't given the Nobel prize for their now-famous and groundbreaking 'B2FH' paper Synthesis of the Elements in Stars.

If ever a group of researchers were cheated out of a Nobel prize then they were it - but then, Hoyle sometimes rubbed people up the wrong way and perhaps the overly-politically minded Nobel committee didn't want any flak. (Perhaps his blunt Yorkshireman style of calling a spade a 'spade' in the presence of BS wasn't considered sufficiency genteel enough for him to be a member of that elite mob.)

That said, I reckon Hoyle and his collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe jumped the gun on panspermia as the evidence for such an extraordinary claim isn't there. As Carl Sagan once remarked "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I've only read the abstract of this article (not having immediate access to the paper), but I have to wonder why we're now requestioning whether life - and thus the Cambrian Explosion was the result of terrestrial (i e.: Earth-based abiogenesis), or cosmic intervention in the absence of any new (and extraordinary) evidence.

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^ B2FH: Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, Fred Hoyle.*