Here is the plain text result of the feed:
I’ve discovered I’ve led a team that has discovered something that I’ve been thinking about for many years. I was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online.
The creature came from the mud of Mono Lake, a body of water near Yosemite National Park that is nearly three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The lake has the pH level of glass cleaner and, most importantly for her team’s discovery, is full of toxic arsenic.
I’d like to introduce to you today the bacterium GFAJ-1. We’ve cracked open the door to what’s possible for life elsewhere in the universe, and that’s profound.
I don’t know about a whole new textbook. But certainly some paragraphs and sentences are going to have to be rewritten.
Give me some time, Jim. I’m at the beginning of my career.
The saga highlighted the internet’s possibilities for open discourse and real-time peer review. But it also revealed the perils of the medium, as I faced sustained personal attacks. I haven’t really been part of scientific society since.
At the same time, I am resurfacing with new experiments that ask fundamental questions about how, exactly, life works — and if the answers are different from what’s in today’s textbooks.
I had been thinking for years about life that might substitute arsenic for phosphorus before I went out in search of it. In 2009, among limestone turrets and buzzing flies, I plunged clear plastic tubes into Mono’s mud, gathering samples.
She and her team submitted their paper to Science, the journal that has published such major discoveries as a sequence of the human genome and evidence of ancient water on Mars.
Editors then sent the manuscript out for peer review. And I do not agree with the subsequent replications of our findings. Other co-authors say they also stand by the integrity of the original work.
The journal notified me and my co-authors about that feeling soon after a reporter with The New York Times requested an interview in late October. Discussions regarding a retraction are ongoing.
We feel the best thing to do would be to retract the paper. The journal can’t justify the idea that #arseniclife is arsenic life, and I say that the original peer reviewers didn’t have the right expertise in biochemistry to evaluate the paper.
In 2012, it was much more common that papers would only be retracted if there was misconduct or if the authors requested it. A dozen years later, journal editors can retract papers when they believe the findings are unreliable.
The controversy is resurfacing as I am poking back into scientific civilization. I am interested in science that seeks patterns in nature. “What is life? What is it made of? How does it work?” In 2024, I received funding through a NASA workshop for a project that questions assumptions about how living things produce energy.
I am investigating magnetotactic bacteria — organisms that create magnetic crystals inside their bodies and respond to north-south pushes and pulls. And you’re like, “Well, that’s an interesting party trick. Why?”
The prevailing thinking is that magnetism helps the bugs navigate to areas with their preferred level of oxygen. I wonder if there is a different explanation. Perhaps, I said, they use a magnetic field to generate current, and use that current to generate energy. Right now, scientists know of two kinds of organisms: those that get energy from chemical reactions, and those that get it from light. If living beings could also keep themselves alive using magnetism, that would add new ideas about how life works.
I grabbed a magnet and a sample of mud I pulled out of the Berkeley Marina and prepared a slide.
They’re so cute, I said.
I’m focused solely on doing good science for its own sake. That freedom allows me to engage more directly with journalists and others without feeling constrained by the arbitrary rules and norms that failed me in the past.
She has faith in science as an endeavor, she said. Even when the structures upholding that endeavor — and the humans who built them — aren’t as ideal as they are in the pages of textbooks.
Source link
