For those who have been following the news about the surprising claim by Felisa Wolfe-Simon that a bacterium isolated from Mono Lake incorporated arsenate into its DNA backbone in place of phosphate, there seems to be some pretty strong refutation of the claims now. (I blogged about it twice before: when the story first came out and later when the experimental refutations were beginning to come out.)
Rosie Redfield have openly posted data using better lab procedures that show no arsenic in the DNA. The latest post in the series addresses some incorrect assertions about Dr. Redfield’s protocols that appeared in the Nature News article Study challenges existence of arsenic-based life.
With this new data, the burden is clearly on Dr. Wolfe-Simon to either retract her paper or provide some more convincing evidence for her astonishing claim. I am doubtful that Science will put any pressure on her to retract, since they have a long history of presenting sensational, but wrong, science papers.
“gasstationwithoutpumps” says it is convincing, so that’s good enough for me. Peer review schmeer review.
Comment by Dave — 2012 January 31 @ 13:29 |
The peer review process failed rather badly in letting the original paper through with such poor evidence. The astonishing result in the paper has not been substantiated in much more careful experimentation by others. Dave, do you really believe the astonishing claim of the original paper (that DNA was made replacing the phosphate with arsenate) in the face of the rather substantial evidence against the claim now? Just because the original paper was refereed (by the journal Science, which has always preferred astonishing claims to well-validated ones)?
Comment by gasstationwithoutpumps — 2012 January 31 @ 14:21 |