Novel expansion of living chemistry or just a serious mistake?
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 315; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1574-6968.2010.02202.x
ISSN1574-6968
Autores Tópico(s)Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology
ResumoThe recent online report in Science ( ⇓ ; http://www.sciencexpress.org ) that a newly isolated bacterial strain can apparently replace phosphate with arsenate in cellular constituents such as DNA and RNA either (1) wonderfully expands our imaginations as to how living cells might function (as the authors and the sponsoring government agency, the USA NASA, claim) or (2) is just the newest example of how scientist-authors can walk off the plank in their imaginations when interpreting their results, how peer reviewers (if there were any) simply missed their responsibilities and how a press release from the publisher of Science can result in irresponsible publicity in the New York Times and on television. We suggest the latter alternative is the case, and that this report should have been stopped at each of several stages. This is the newest example following when Nature was absurd in publishing favorable reports on the magical spoon-bending telepathist Uri Geller ( Nature , 251, 1974, pp. 602–607) and later immunologist J. Benveniste ‘water with memory’ ( Nature 333, 1988, pp. 816–818, DOI: 10.1038/333816a0), and Science in 1989 published ‘cold fusion’ reports when competent readers thought the ideas just could not be correct. The authors report three results with their new bacterial isolate, all of which seem reasonable to anyone with experience with arsenic microbiology. They interpret and basically claim as the inevitable conclusion that the results demonstrate a biochemistry that should not be imagined, except by science fiction authors …
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