Arsenic-Based Life Shakes Up Science (Again) On December 2, 2010, NASA called a press conference to trumpet a discovery that the agency said would “impact the search for extraterrestrial life.”
A team of scientists led by microbiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon took the stage and described a new bacterium, discovered in a salty lake, that incorporates the normally toxic element arsenic into its DNA. Finding a living thing whose fundamental chemistry is unlike that of any other known organism hinted at different kinds of biology that could take hold on faraway worlds. It was almost like finding alien life on Earth. But once the excitement subsided and people examined the study closely, a nasty backlash ensued. “We found that evidence in the paper for such an extreme claim was really very weak,” says microbiologist Rosie Redfield of the University of British Columbia. But open science does not necessarily mean better or faster science. Wolfe-Simon, meanwhile, is staying traditional. The Light on Life. Richard Zare doesn’t want to talk about life on Mars.
It’s not that the prospect of life on other planets isn’t fascinating. It’s just that everything else is, too. The Stanford chemistry professor sits behind the enormous conference table that extends from his desk, an acre of oak sown here and there with lecture notes, correspondence, manuscripts, congressional testimony, and results of experiments in progress. A lot of it is Mars-related--which is great, what’s not to like? --but Zare was busy and happy enough before there were people asking for his autograph, farmers calling him to ask if the red rocks they’d plowed up were Martian, and everyone in the media asking for just a minute with the man who told Jim Lehrer we may all be Martians: Ted Koppel, Time, the documentary director who demanded he be filmed while bathed in an eerie red glow (Zare refused), and now you, waiting by the door while he checks his E-mail.
What do you think of this? I think it’s ugly and powerful. Me? 3 People Who Are Pushing the Edge of Science. 1 Angela Belcher Why?
It is clean and efficient.Where? MITInitial response: “I was called insane.” When 40-year-old materials chemist Angela Belcher was a child, she wanted to be an inventor. “I would try to build things out of scrap material that we had in the garage,” she says. Although Belcher was interested in DNA, the molecules she most loved were proteins. In a series of experiments at MIT, Belcher, working with a team of about 30 students and postdocs, has successfully programmed viruses to incorporate, then grow, a variety of inorganic materials, including nanoscale semiconductors, solar cells, and magnetic storage materials.
Belcher has begun working with the U.S. “We have a long way to go,” Belcher says. Synthesis and organization of nanoscale II–VI semiconductor materials using evolved peptide specificity and viral capsid assembly - Journal of Materials Chemistry. Lee Cronin: Making matter come alive. Spontaneous assembly and real-time growth of micrometre-scale tubular structures from polyoxometalate-based inorganic solids. The Cronin Group.