I'm so glad I didn't blog about the arsenic bacterial. The paper's basic methods were probably flawed, and NASA won't defend themselves. In short, we don't know yet whether there's even a story yet, let alone one deserving a press conference.
"We cannot indiscriminately wade into a media forum for debate at this time," senior author Ronald Oremland told Carl Zimmer. Which would be fine if they hadn't kicked this story off with a well-hyped press conference. But they've already waded into that media forum, and done so fairly indiscriminately. Maybe wading discriminately into a discussion with competent microbiologists on blogs would be better than talking to Gawker at a press conference.
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For those that haven't heard about the NASA/arsenic bacteria story that's been exploding all over the science blogosphere over the last couple of weeks, I like the summary over at Jonathan Eisen's Tree of Life blog:
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