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Princeton Team Casts More Doubt On Arsenic DNA Claims
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers reports they can't reproduce the most important claim from 2010's controversial 'arsenic bacteria' paper — they find no arsenic in the bug's DNA. Meanwhile, other scientists are looking at different aspects of the bug and at arsenic in biology in general."
I don't know who are and what these "people" did. But it is your job as a scientist to scrutinize everything, specially when someone do something that has a flawed procedure. We can't just accept something said by someone, we have to reproduce it, we have to investigate it ourselves and confirm the results. Now unfortunately many times during history many results were refuted by other scientist simply because it didn't agree with the current dogma, look at Mendel it took many years before his results were accepted by the people in that field. So attacking someone's work is valid, but there is a correct way to do it and not attack it for the sake of bashing.
It's a feature.
How am I supposed to take a summary seriously when it refers to bacteria as a "bug"?
While this is seen as probably an oversimplification of describing bacteria, viruses, etc. there are probably a lot of dictionary entries backing this up like the fifth one in Wiktionary: "A contagious illness; a bacterium or virus causing it." You also had media in the late nineties using this virtually everywhere. See this BBC article for an example. The fact that researchers themselves have used phrases like Super Bug to describe resistant bacteria to lay people probably doesn't help. English is viscous. Deal with it.
My work here is dung.
The big problem with the original researchers was two fold - first, it was very preliminary. They had an unusual hypothesis (the bug, sorry, the bacterium) used arsenic in place of phosphate for the DNA 'backbone'. That's so unusual that it falls into the 'extraordinary evidence' category.
But they didn't do that - they performed some basic microbiology and some even more basic biochemistry. There were hundreds of other potential experiments that they just ignored, even though they were pretty mainstream and could likely have gotten some grad student to at least to the preliminary ones. Pretty much anyone who has done DNA chemistry would look at the paper and ask why the team didn't bother to do any one of a number of other experiments to tie the arsenic into the DNA. (The original paper basically suggested that since there was arsenic in the bug and the bugs grew where others could not because of the high arsenic and low phosphate levels, the arsenic was being structurally incorporated into the DNA).
THEN they hyped it to no end - made it sound like the Second Coming of DNA. That was their big error (hubris). It was weird enough in itself to get other people to look at it. That's always a problem with 'new' ideas since most labs are busy doing things they think they're supposed to be doing and don't necessarily have the time (or money) to go chase down other little issues.
It seems like some PR idiot at NASA got wind of the research and tried to fly with it but it was really a stupid thing to do.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I never understood how some people were so incredibly aggressively against the team that made the claim. This is how science works!
Its sounds like a classic theorist vs experimentalist battle. The experimentalists are trying to think up all kinds of fun ways to disprove her new theory, because its a pretty wide ranging theory so there is an extremely wide front to attack.
You see a theorist "makes points" by coming up with interesting theories, which she has certainly done. But an experimentalist "makes points" by coming up with interesting experiments, and there sure are a lot of interesting possible experiments to perform in this very wide ranging theory...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The third problem: they refused to engage their critics. They simply stonewalled their peers. That's not how science is done. Compare it to the OPERA neutrino study, which was an equally hyped and unlikely claim, but the authors openly solicited rebuttals.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
They were pretty mean spirited because it was clear from the outset that it was almost certainly a technical error. Scientists don't get anything out of cleaing up someone elses mistakes. These people could have spent their time doing real work if the original researcher had washed her samples properly.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It seems we are seeing a lot more of these extraordinary claims and studies become challenged recently ranging from cancer research to climate change denialists skirting the peer review process:
I think money plays a huge part in some of this. Think of the falsified research on the health benefits of Resveratrol and how those studies helped form a legitimacy around diet fad drugs that account for a billion dollar industry. It is an extremely lucrative industry and some of that money may end up funding future studies.
The same thing can be said about the corrupting influence of corporate money in funding climate change denial studies. If as a scientist, my research is being funded by oil companies who clearly want the studies to find a certain conclusion, you would be driving a stake in the heart of your career if you come to any other conclusion than climate change being unclear.
Other times there is enormous competition in research and a successful groundbreaking study will sometimes launch a lucrative career. The temptation can be great to make grandoise claims to jumpstart a career because by the time peer review trashes it, you may have already secured a cushy grant.
She's not a theorist, she's an experimentalist. It was an experimental study. The criticisms are, largely, on the quality of her experimental protocols.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Its rather amazing to see the glaring headline "Retraction" in the letters section of these distinguished journals on a regular basis now. A dozen major scientists have written Science asking to retract the arsenic life paper. The policy is for authors to request retraction unless its a really extreme case like the XMRV retraction a few weeks ago (principal investigator in jail and authors suing each other). Most authors are honest and sometimes realize they've rushed to print without reproducible results. Then they'll retract.
I dont think there is anything horribly wrong with this process. Labs do rush to print for fame and priority. Readers want to see the newest results. There are many more papers now than decades ago. Reviewers dont have time to replicate the results during the review span of time and have to use their best judgment. Mistakes happen and are corrected. This is merely how good science works.
True, but you do that at your peril. Even scientists can be passive aggressive. The bug they found is now being called GFAJ-1 (Give Felisa A Job, Felisa Simon-Wolfe being one the scientists in the original article who has been less than open about the controversy). That's going to be tough to live down. Biologists love to have critters named after themselves, but not quite in this fashion.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Um, I'm pretty sure Felisa Simon-Wolfe named it that herself. She was a postdoc when she did the work and it she named it that as a joke about getting a faculty position (i.e. a real job).
If they'd done as you're supposed to and submitted a paper for peer review FIRST, it would have been quietly shredded by the reviewers
In (partial) defense of the NASA folks, they had indeed submitted the paper for peer review, and it had been accepted to Science magazine - it appeared online the same day (or close to it) as their hand-waving press conference. That it didn't get shredded by peer reviewers is testament to either the laziness of peer reviewers, or the ease with which high-profile journals can be duped into publishing weak but exciting claims. (This happens frequently, I'm afraid.) They should have done much more thorough experiments, but the journals are supposed to filter out hypotheses that haven't been sufficiently proven.
The problem with the press conference was that they made much more grandiose claims about the importance of their work than the evidence merited. If they'd stuck to publishing the paper and a diplomatically-worded press release, it still would have been very controversial, but it would not have elicited such a passionate response.
You are incorrect. Evidence can have varying levels of quality. You get weak evidence, you get strong evidence, and you can also get extraordinary evidence.
If any hypothesis is well-supported by established theory, it is only necessary for there to be mediocre evidence for it. In the absence of any reasonable alternative, it can then be accepted as correct, because it is backed not only by that weak evidence but also by all the strong evidence that supports the established theory.
If a hypothesis contradicts established theory, the evidence for it must be particularly strong. Accepted theory is based on the BALANCE of evidence being in favour of one hypothesis over another.
There is always at least some evidence to support a crackpot claim, otherwise that claim would never have been made. To simply abandon a theory because another theory has some evidence to support it is pure folly. The only reasonable action is to compare the sum of evidence for competing theories.
(Upon re-examining your post, it seems possible that you are mistakenly taking the phrase 'extraordinary evidence' to mean 'evidence of something extraordinary', it isn't clear. If so, you have completely misunderstood the grandparent post.)
If it's in you sig, it's in your post.