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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As a journalist who reports frequently on science, I never expected to be publishing in the literature. But tomorrow I will actually have a paper in the Policy Forum section of the latest issue of Science (April 6). To be sure, this wouldn't have come about if I hadn't had a co-author who's a real…
Yeah, I'm talking about you, #scio11. The conference that still has significant twitter traffic three days after it's over. I've been to conferences that don't have that kind of traffic while they're happening. In fact, that would be pretty well every other conference.
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Well, I survived.
Science Online 2012 took place this past weekend and it was a blast. There's already been quite a bit of discussion in blogs and on Twitter about how it went.
A very small selection of the them bits are:
Scattered reflections about ScienceOnline 2012 (#scio12)
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Maybe it's just the snark in me, but the thing that keeps coming up in my mind is the fact that the first Director of NASA was Wernher von Braun.