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Arsenic life does not exist after all...

newscientist.com

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Re: Arsenic life does not exist after all...

#2

Post by rylz »

The title is a bit misleading. One other lab's failure to reproduce the results does not prove invalidity of the original publication. It certainly raises some eyebrows, but it makes sense to wait and see what comes of Wolfe-Simon's further analysis before we declare that arsenic life definitely does not exist.

Re: Arsenic life does not exist after all...

#5

Post by corin_ »

veyron wrote: post #3

I've never heard of new scientist. Is it a real science journal or sensationalist? (based on this article I'd guess the latter)

It's an English magazine that's somewhere inbetween your two options. Generally their reporting is pretty good and they avoid headlines for the sake of headlines, however they do put a lot of focus on making their content understandable to non-scientists - it's aimed at smart, curious people, not scientists.

An example of this is their "last word" feature, where they take a question from a reader and let anyone write in with answers - these are usually random questions like "Why is the sky blue?" or "If it's raining, will I get less wet if I run than if I walk?" They've also released two or three Last Word compilation books.

Re: Arsenic life does not exist after all...

#7

Post by robinhouston »

I don’t think the scientific community really bought it in the first place. The original experiment wasn’t especially rigorous; e.g. see Rosie Redfield’s review http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2010/12/arsenic-associa...

And then the authors declined to respond in detail to any of the specific criticisms that had been made by other scientists, which is very rarely a good sign.

Re: Arsenic life does not exist after all...

#8

Post by Tim-Boss »

rylz wrote: post #2

The title is a bit misleading. One other lab's failure to reproduce the results does not prove invalidity of the original publication. It certainly raises some eyebrows, but it makes sense to wait and see what comes of Wolfe-Simon's further analysis before we declare that arsenic life definitely does not exist.

Agreed; a sensationalist title adds nothing to an otherwise accurate article!

Re: Arsenic life does not exist after all...

#9

Post by coob »

corin_ wrote: post #5
veyron wrote: post #3

I've never heard of new scientist. Is it a real science journal or sensationalist? (based on this article I'd guess the latter)

It's an English magazine that's somewhere inbetween your two options. Generally their reporting is pretty good and they avoid headlines for the sake of headlines, however they do put a lot of focus on making their content understandable to non-scientists - it's aimed at smart, curious people, not scientists. An example of this is their "last word" feature, where they take a question from a reader and let anyone write…

If anyone is interested in the sound of this there is something similar over on this subreddit:

http://reddit.com/r/askscience

Re: Arsenic life does not exist after all...

#10

Post by nwatson »

Even if the organisms were shown to swap out phosphorus for arsenic in some instances in their DNA, would that be surprising? Arsenic comes from the same column in the periodic table as phosphorus, and exhibits many of the same macro chemical properties as phosphorus.

It would be like a software engineer swapping out their optimized, say, C++ string library, for one that was less optimal but perhaps took less space or ran better in a constrained embedded environment. Arsenic might not be optimal but it's what's available, what can be used.

In the software case you'd probably be OK but run more slowly than otherwise, or else maybe you'd stumble when for some strange reason the sub-optimal string library didn't guarantee thread-safe read operations. The arsenic could similarly trip up the organism in some cases.

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