Rock and roll
| 9 December, 2010 | Richard P. Grant |
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An update on my take on the Arsenic story, with both positive and negative comments, is worth reading over at Carl Zimmer’s place.
Science magazine has made the original paper free to view (with the lead author’s personal email address in plain sight. Eek.) Our evaluation is also free to view.
And just for fun, here’s Baruch Blumberg talking about NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, from Web of Stories:
You work ten years on a mission and it blows up before it takes off
Video from Web of Stories; see all of Baruch Blumberg’s stories.
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Richard – This quotation from Eavesdroppings is amusing on its own merit, but I doubt I would have laughed out loud when I read it if it weren’t for the arsenic story.
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The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.
—Researcher/physician John Ioannidis, quoted in an Atlantic Monthly profile, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science” (Nov. 2010)
Read more: Eavesdroppings – The Scientist – Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57825/#ixzz17k5oUXhd
Hah! Convergent evolution, or something.
Why do we have a NASA Astrobiology Institute since no biology has been found outside Earth? The fiasco around the arsenic story is that it revolves around novel terrestrial biology. I would suggest a renaming to the NASA Biiology Institute, because everything associated with so-called “astrobiology” has thus far been related to discoveries of life here on Earth and suppositions of how life might have began here, and only peripherally how results might be related to life potentially elsewhere.