Heavy Metal
| 7 December, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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Unless you’ve been living under an arsenic-laden rock, you have probably heard the news that wasn’t news from NASA. We didn’t find alien life, and we didn’t even find a new form of life on Earth.
What Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues found was a type of bacterium that can grow (albeit very, very slowly) in surprisingly large amounts of arsenic. That in itself is pretty neat, and it’s really rather a shame that NASA pimped it up to be something else, even calling a press conference to announce a press conference to announce a paper.
But as with most things in science, the initial paper is by no means the full story—and it has already been taken apart quite thoroughly by Rosie Redfield. What’s really interesting, and is likely to have more of an impact on science as a whole, is NASA’s contention that Rosie’s critique can be dismissed because it wasn’t written in a peer-reviewed journal. NASA seems to be really failing to grasp the point here, because scientists (experts in the field, at that) will talk about papers and findings wherever they can, on blogs, on twitter; and only eventually in a peer-reviewed journal. I’m all for opening up communication within the scientific endeavour (as well as between scientists and everyone else), so this kind of discussion is, in my opinion, undoubtedly a good thing.
What [NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown] fails to see or refuses to acknowledge is that Rosie Redfield is a peer, and her blog is peer review. NASA has bungled its presentation of this paper from start to finish. It makes worse by trying to dismiss critiques this way. This is the wrong stuff.
—David Dobbs
I’m quite interested in what NASA would make of F1000 to be honest. A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus has already been evaluated (that’s a free link, by the way) by Laura Landweber at Princeton; it will surely gather more evaluations, and possibly even a dissent or two. This is post-publication peer review, and we’re all part of it.
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According to her twitter account, Felise was pretty stoked about the F1000 rec. http://twitter.com/#!/ironlisa/statuses/11827898067456000
I heard about the science before I heard about NASA’s announcement, and I was surprised to hear the announcement mocked (on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me). It sounded like a very exciting finding and certainly relevant (potentially, maybe, somewhere down the line) for future research into life on other planets.
Having learned more from Richard Grant’s article, it strikes me that NASA has been tone deaf (as was I, to be frank). I’m sure the science itself sounds simply arcane to many people, and the link to extra-terrestrial life must sound more bizarre than substituting arsenic for phosphorous. NASA’s rejection of “non-peer-reviewed” comments is similarly tone deaf, but again I see the point.
There is a kind of nit-picking on both sides here – NASA nit-picking that Dr. Redfield’s critique didn’t appear in a peer reviewed journal, Dr. Grant nip-picking that it is certainly a form of peer review (even if it isn’t in a peer reviewed journal). I don’t mean to dismiss Dr. Grant’s point, which is quite valid, but just to observe that this, too, can be heard in quite different ways by different audiences.
Thanks for your comment, Ken. I think that a lot of people haven’t quite caught up with the new way of doing things. It’s not that long ago that one couldn’t discuss scientific papers in the open with anything approaching this ease. Yes, it’s game-changing; no, it doesn’t do away with the need for pre-publication peer review (I thought I’d better add that!).
To be honest, I think there was a bit of disappointment that (a) it’s not a new form of life (b) it’s by no means clear that arsenate has been incorporated instead of phosphate in any meaningful fashion.
There is a comment in the Bible in Ecclesiastes 1:9
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”
I remember learning about these type of bacterium some years ago. And as I do not hold a scientific post or training it was out of interest to know what exsists in our world. NASA has sensationalised nothing new.
What else is new?
welcome to the world!
ok, back to work…
bye!
And I remember hearing the Byrds sing:
“To everything…there is a season…” – also poached from Eccles, I have no doubt, but highly apposite.
Strong claims need strong evidence – and unless / until the NASA bunch show that the bugs in question are not just eking out a miserable and eventually terminal existence by scavenging phosphate from their own membranes, what we have is hype, and not science. RPG is right; peer review need not happen only in peer-reviewed journals.
Now that I’ve read Nature’s “Microbe gets toxic response” (7 December 2010 | Nature 468, 741 (2010) | doi:10.1038/468741a – http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101207/full/468741a.html), I see that I gave NASA too much credit (and Dr. Grant too little) in my earlier comment. Communicating science to the public is too important for grandstanding. I hope NASA and everyone else learns a lesson from this. (At least it’s not as bad as cold fusion was.)
Thanks for that link. Jonathan Eisen has an awesome comment. he
The responses on the article are funny too, for a change.
Time for a little classic microbiology here, methinks, where the possibility of residual phosphate is completely negated by MUCH more passage in PO4-free media. And then a little molbio where the DNA/RNA is purified to be SQUEAKY clean, and then flown in a nice new mass spec. Just a little more work!! Then it really is special, or it’s just a bug that’s good at scavenging minimal nutrients. And we move ON….
I think it is a refreshing change to see an article undergo some seriously critical peer review post-publication. That said, despite the extraordinary claims, critics and reviewers should stick to criticising purely on the basis of the science presented. Just one or two personal or casual off-topic remarks in a blog can raise hackles and the whole debate could be seen as a slanging match thus casting this type of open discussion in a bad light.
@Ed–definitely.
@Mohammed, that’s a very good point. It’s all to easy to get personal on these sort of fora, and that should be very much avoided.