As you may very well have heard by now, NASA made a bit of a splash today in the mainstream media and especially the science (and sci-fi too, of course) blogosphere / twitterverse through its press conference about a fascinating biological discovery with potential astrobiological significance. An "alien" life-form that incorporates Arsenic (which normally kills our kind of life-form) instead of Phosphorus in the "backbone" of its very DNA. Actually its a bacterium from the mud at the bottom of Mono Lake, east of the Sierra Nevada in California, not some bug-eyed green monster from your sci-fi imagination, even though the lakescape itself has an otherworldly quality to it:
So, a bacterium that uses Arsenic is found in an old lake... well, the poor joke (and the title of this blog post) practically writes itself doesn't it? Maybe they should name this bacterium "old lace", as someone tweeted. Here's what the wee beastie looks like:
NASA's press conference was timed to coincide with the publication of a paper about this discovery, but the advance notice from NASA generated a fair amount of hype and breathless anticipation about "alien life" and so forth. The
paper itself is now available at Science (
perhaps behind a pay firewall, but maybe not), so you can read it and make up your own mind. The paper is very interesting indeed and the central discovery of this strange form of DNA in the bacterium leads to endlessly fascinating questions and speculations about the origin and evolution of life on this planet, and perhaps on others. The media hype surrounding the discovery, though... well, what can one say about media hype about such stories?
Rather than try to translate the paper for you poorly (me not being a microbiologist and all) or engage in more poorly-informed speculation, let me point you instead to several good blog posts that do a much better job than I ever could, and also offer a more balanced perspective to keep the hype in check but also share the excitement of such a fascinating discovery. To start with what's actually in the paper itself, Bhalomanush does a good job of describing the methodology underlying the discovery, while asking "
Dude, where's my alien life?". Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, who had been urging caution to cool the hype building up in anticipation of NASA's announcement, offers a
typically readable perspective on the real news. His fellow Discover magazine blogger Ed Yong offers perhaps
the best commentary I have read on the whole discovery and pours some well-deserved cold water on some of the breathless hype. Over on ScienceBlogs,
Greg Laden takes a more evolutionary perspective and places this study in the context of what it might—and might not—mean for the origin of life on our planet as well as Charlie Darwin's second theory about a common ancestor shared among all known lifeforms. Even if the paper is too much for you (
some of it is for me because my PhD is in the wrong kind of biology for this stuff!), you'll do much better to read these blog posts rather than the more mainstream media accounts, I think.
Let's cool the hype a bit shall we, down to just the right level of simmering excitement at which the science can really thrive.
Reference:
Wolfe-Simon, F., Blum, J.S., Kulp, T.R., Gordon. G.W., Hoeft, S.E., Pett-Ridge, J., Stolz, J.F., Webb, S.M., Weber, P.K., Davies, P.C.W., Anbar, A.D., and, Oremland, R.S. (2010). A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus Science (early release on Dec 2, 2010).
I'm a reconciliation ecologist studying the responses of wildlife to human influences through an evolutionary lens. I seek ways to apply evolutionary ecology towards reconciling biodiversity conservation with human development. Also a father of two girls; photographer; birdwatcher; bookworm; cinephile; and explorer of the internets.
