at least when there isn’t fraud involved…
Arsenic-based life finding fails follow-up
Tests see no evidence that microbe uses element in cellular machinery
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/338090/title/Arsenic-based_life_finding_fails_follow-up
It was really interesting when it was first reported that an organism could thrive in an environment with such a high concentration of arsenic that it would be immediately fatal to any other organism. It seems that too many people jumped too quickly to conclusions that different biochemistry was involved and more sensitive tests have shown that the organism was ‘just’ able to keep the arsenic out of its system (still quite amazing, though, just amazing in a different way). I never read the original paper, but I have seen the original author on science shows (she is very easy on the eyes!) and she makes some pretty clear claims about her expectation of alternate biochemistry, so I can see how the community would treat this current report as a repudiation of her work. There is growing anticipation of the discovery of an alternative biochemistry growing somewhere in/on our planet, as, based on our understandings of the origin of life, we would expect that there be a decent chance that in some fringe environments there would be some ‘left over’ remnants of the beginning of life when we would expect a nearly infinite variety of life biochemistries. So Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s report wasn’t greeted with as much skepticism as one might have thought as an outsider looking in on science.
