Comments on: Scientist Smackdown: Experts Challenge Story of Arsenic-Loving Bacteria

By: wedding photography essex

wedding photography essex — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 05:59:58 +0000

I have not checked in here for some time since I thought it was getting boring, but the last several posts are good quality so I guess I will add you back to my everyday bloglist. You deserve it friend :)

By: Eliza Strickland

Eliza Strickland — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 16:48:58 +0000

@ Photo_Guy: It’s one of the photos that the journal Science released to the press for free use. The image’s copyright is “2010 Henry Bortman.”

– Eliza, DISCOVER online news editor

By: Photo_Guy

Photo_Guy — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:55:50 +0000

Hey, do you have a source for that photo of Mono Lake you used for this? It looks mysteriously, amazingly, but perhaps coincidentally identical to one of my own.

By: J-sci

J-sci — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:43:10 +0000

All the criticism and shock of this work has less to do with the actual methods and claims and more to do with the quality of the peer review process used by Science Magazine and it’s editorial staff. Everyone agrees that this paper should not have gone out to press in its present form. Had this paper have been reviewed by a single competent biochemist, then the direct MS issue of DNA would have been brought up and the appropriate controls conducted. Extraordinary claims deserved extraordinary evidence. We can only conclude that a) the reviewers were derelict in their duties as subject matter experts, b) this paper was not reviewed by subject matter experts (highly possible in the exobiology field), or c) it was reviewed by subject matter experts, these issues were brought up to the editor, but the editorial staff chose to publish anyway to draw press attention and increase circulation. There is a reason why both Science and Nature have such high retraction rates.
We should all hold judgement until someone performs the task of trying and detect nucleotide arsenate esters. If this turns out to be bunk, then the paper should be retracted. This should have been done in the first place though.

By: Gdawg

Gdawg — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:37:11 +0000

#4 is close to correct, #1 and 2 way off base. It is puzzling why the authors didn’t conduct more conclusive analyses. They should have known better. There are even simpler ways than ms to prove the As or P content of DNA and the ratio of both to total nucleotide content. Expense is minor. The authors also utterly failed to acknowledge well known examples of As incorporation into a variety of biomolecules, e.g., lipids and sugars, under natural conditions as opposed to the highly artificial conditions of the reported growth experiments. The authors also failed to note that some plants hyper-accumulate As in vacuoles… which notably occurred in the +As incubations of the isolate. The bottom line is that there is no reason to expect that As is important in structural or informational macromolecules on Earth, and given the much larger cosmological abundance of P over As, no reason to expect that stony planets elsewhere in the universe are compositionally much different than Earth either.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 19:49:05 +0000

This should be ironed out when they actually complete their research (meaning mass spectrometry of the DNA), although I, too am curious as to why they didn’t do it in the first place… we were isolating DNA and doing mass spec on all sorts of biological materials in my poorly-funded community college O. Chem class…

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:27:47 +0000

Why would you want the ‘results”out there, if you knew you didn’t have the money to do a proper job? Why didn’t you state that when delivering the results?

Fame seekers should go into the entertainment business and leave science to those who do their homework.

By: sciencekid

sciencekid — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 10:26:19 +0000

NASA stopped being relevant along time ago.
This is just piss poor research. Mass spectrometry is an unbelievably simple experiment, that doesn’t cost much at relative to a lot of research techniques. Such an extraordinary claim should have had some extraordinary evidence.Yet the experiment was so badly designed on so many levels, and lacks basic things like mass spec, or some other form of validation.

Also this is being so heavily attacked because a lot of scientists hate flashy crap. Especially academic scientists, its just part of the culture to cut thru bulls***. I’ve seen world renown scientists get far worse criticism on their research, because they were trying to pull some shoddy experiments. Also Science , the journal, is like the holy grail for a lot of labs and researchers. So to see a shoddy piece of garbage get in , due to favoritism, is absolutely infuriating , I guess.

[Moderator's note: edited the cuss word.]

By: scribbler

scribbler — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 04:06:24 +0000

Wouldn’t it be prudent to await the mass spec tests?

By: Think-Hank

Think-Hank — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 01:35:30 +0000

True that. Also, if the discovery had come from a 50-year-old male scientist, you wouldn’t be seeing this level of attack… but no, it was a lovely young lady with a pierced nose. Don’t kid yourselves about age discrimination and chauvinism — both are alive and well in the Good Ole Boy science communities.

By: nick

nick — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 23:54:29 +0000

Part of the reason folks are so hasty to jump on the critical bandwagon is that if this discovery is true, the discoverer’s names go down in history and everyone else is forgotten about. :) Also, this is likely a Nobel-prize worthy discovery, if it should prove true.