Inside scoop from the NASA man who was way ahead of the rest of NASA on those Mono microbes with arsenic in their genes
................credit Henry Bortman
Here’s what may be the last jot in the exegesis of the Mono Lake microbe hubbub last week that initially caused such a spate of false stories and eventually some far more fact-based reporting.
To back up – The Tracker noted, early on the first day I posted on this matter, that NASW-member Henry Bortman, managing editor of Astrobiology Magazine (funded by NASA through its Astrobiology Institute), had taken some dynamite pictures at Mono Lake. By late that day, I added in updates that further internet cruising revealed he had also written for his magazine a story more than a year ago on the exact same topic. While preliminary, it included most of the thematic elements of the news that finally broke big upon its formal presentation in Science. That is, he had the scoop.
Late Friday he filled me in on how that story came together. He also defends, in reasonable fashion, his original reporting on the angle that I found outlandish, and lingered in press even after NASA’s press release. This is that these microbes might be a remnant of some second birth and radiation of life on Earth billions of years ago, independent of biology as we’ve known it till now. That is, alien animalcules from right here on the home planet.
Anybody in the business, and many who are not, will find this well worth reading. Here’s Henry:
Charlie,
Thanks for keeping me honest. I confess to overwriting in my first article. But not by much.
At the time the first article was written, October 2009, Wolfe-Simon had been growing her organisms for only a few weeks She was still at the stage at which she was shocked that anything was still alive in her test tubes. She had no idea what was living in them, how it was using arsenic, or how significant a finding it was. At that point, it was possible that what she had found did, indeed, represent a second origin of life.
As it turned out, the facts fell far short of the speculation. I failed to maintain a clear distinction between the two. But it’s not fair to use what’s now known about the organism as an argument against speculation about it at an earlier stage of the process. I still believe that if an obligate arsenophile had been found, an organism that used arsenic exclusively, for which phosphorus were a poison, it would have raised the possibility of a second origin.
Furthermore, yes, I’m in-house, and yes I took the pictures, and yes NASA reimbursed me for the costs I incurred traveling to the field with Wolfe-Simon. But I found the story the old-fashioned way, by reading scientific papers and being curious and making phone calls. No-one assigned me to go out in the field with her. She was a young scientist with a wacky idea. Most people, even the ones who gave her money, even the ones who let her work in their lab, thought she was wasting her time. I took the initiative to write up her work. So, okay, I’m a NASA hack, I admit it. But in this case, I deserve a little credit for sniffing out a good story./ hb.
December 6th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Hi Charlie,
I just read the Science article. There are holes big enough to drive a truck through. Now I understand the hedging commments in virtually every published interview I have seen. In brief, there has been no direct analysis of the macromolecules that are reported to have incorporated As. The conclusions are based on growth in As+/P- conditions and total As/P content. I am shocked that this paper was accepted for publication within a few weeks of submission without careful analysis of the chemical composition of maacromolecules from this organism. Even if this all holds up, I find this to be a failure of the peer review process.
We have not heard the end of this. I won’t be surprised to see this story fall apart quicker than a neutron track in a cold fusion cell.
Paul
December 6th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Paul – You may be correct. Plenty of published articles have short half lives. But it’d be hard for most reporters to say, on reading the paper, that peer review failed. The article says the high concentration of arsenates and low one in phosphates (in the batches force fed those arsenates) is only by inference borne by proteins, DNA, etc. But the inference does seem strong. The weight fraction of phosphate looked too low for ordinary cells to be able to multiply and grow. And Xray data indicate the arsenates had bond configurations consistent with protein and genetic incorporation. It doesn’t look to me that the authors claimed things they couldn’t back up – that is, there are qualifiers all through the paper. Maybe I missed something.
If it did overreach then, as you say, we ought to be hearing about that pretty quick.
December 7th, 2010 at 5:06 am
Paul–I edited Science’s news coverage of the story and we included comments of those who remain unconvinced, but I don’t think the paper is a failure of peer-review, at least not an obvious one like you assert. That statement may not seem a surprise coming from someone at Science, but I have no inside knowledge on how this paper was peer-reviewed and I’ve criticized my own publication in the past (the reactome paper). I think the issue here is at what point does one publish this paper–some may demand the direct analysis you note but that, I believe, would involved cystalizing the molecule and getting an x-ray structure, a process that could take 3-12 months at a rough guess. It seems to me to many scientists who have commented that they made a compelling, though not foolproof, case of their conclusion.s
December 13th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
John-I assert that there was a failure in peer review because of the principle that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. This is quite an extraordianry claim on the part of a scientist with a relatively limited track record. We can debate how long it would take to establish incorporation of As into nucleic acid (if motivated they could do this in a few months, I asure you that there are plent yof labs willing to assist), but that is beside the point. Even if it did take a year to provide sufficient evidence, wouldn’t that be better than publishing something that is wrong? Franky, 12 months is not that long in the scheme of things. If this claim is misproven, Science will have egg on it’s gace for much longer than 12 months.
Having said that, there appears to be problems withthis paper that are far from extraordinary. Indeed, the greatest concern may be contamination – a fairly mundane problem. There is also the issue of how As-linked nucleic acid remains stable in water throughout the analysis described.