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.
More like this
Finally Nick Wade is wading in on the Neandertal genomics story.
Two more meaty reviews of his li'l book of racism: One by Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist who debated Wade, and the other by
Last year, New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade wrote a few articles in which he referred to genome sequencing as "decoding".
I have a review of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors coming out in the May/June issue of Science & Spirit magazine.
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.