Arsenic-microbe gets toxic response from scientific community | Hacker News Reader

Arsenic-microbe gets toxic response from scientific community

nature.com

34 pointsroadnottaken25 comments

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Some better (IMO) write ups on the scientific controversy:

* http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/

* http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/12/07/and-the-sk...

Also the original discussions on the news:

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1962846

* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1963990

I know it is just your opinion but I find the nature piece to be easily on par with the 'slate' coverage (and of course that's just my opinion ;) ).

Nature typically does not go for spectacle, and the fact that they highlight the total lack of response to criticism from Wolfe et. al is quite telling. If you pick a forum to present your claim you should be willing to defend your claim in that forum.

As far as I can see this will soon be a scientific career ruined not so much by doing bad science but by crawling under a rock to avoid the fall-out, it is my guess that if they could produce the evidence from mass spectrography after isolating the dna that they would have done so by now.

That would conclusively put to rest a lot of the criticism.

Could be my preference in writing style or familiarity with the author or both.

I disagree with your assessment. There's no evidence of malfeasance, just poor judgment with regards to publicity and possibly some oversights in the lab. It wouldn't be reasonable to deeply fault the authors on a technical basis -- it's the job of peer review to catch mistakes before unfounded or embarrassing claims are made. I've seen disputes over conclusions unfold in two ways:

1. The party disputing the finding contacts the corresponding author with specific objections and suggests followup work that would meet those objections. If the objections appear substantive, the author('s lab) may then attempt to validate the finding.

In the case I observed, the lab had fallen victim to a technical artifact. My PI suggested an approach for remedying the error. At the end of the process, he ended up co-authoring a retraction with the author.

2. Someone with specific objections writes to the publication. Generally the publication will give the author an opportunity to produce a rebuttal piece.

This, on the other hand, resembles a slug match.

Why should post-publication peer review be limited to working through Science. That will happen in due course (e.g. Rosie Redfield has already written a letter), but it is perfectly fine for scientists to dispute the paper via their blogs, etc. We live in an era where you do have to be ready for post-publication peer review, especially if you make far reaching claims and choose to do them in a very public manner

I never claimed that it should be. I was just pointing out those cases that I am familiar with.

What they did (press-conferences, etc.) was in poor form.

> This, on the other hand, resembles a slug match.

I think that is a direct consequence of how the initial findings were presented, it suggests that the peer review process was fast tracked in order to present these results as fast as possible and with as much fanfare as possible instead of going the slow and cautious route. I may be wrong about that but it certainly seems strange to read about this wide and far in the mainstream press before the results have been thoroughly vetted.

It smacks of cold fusion all over again.

Oh! I'm sorry for causing confusion. "This" referred to the example I was giving, rather than the situation at hand.

I think that the NASA team is getting every bit they deserve. The only claim I dispute is the bit about their careers being ruined.

3. Someone publishes research, holds a self-congratulatory press conference, ignores criticism. Eventually evidence is refuted and the scientist disgraced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy/ for an example.

The difference is that Wakefield committed fraud. There's a world of difference between slipshod work and just making things up.

  Nature typically does not go for spectacle

Bwahaha, what led you to believe that?

Check out "Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees" some time.

As others have commented here, I find it very telling that maximum publicity was sought when the article was first published, but the lead author seems to dislike the scrutiny brought about by these claims. Due diligence was not done and this paper is not up to Science's usual standards. The shame of it is that this will wind up being another black eye for NASA.

A bit off topic, but does anyone hate the way the public is being brainwashed into thinking that science is more important than creative endeavors? Why is nature more interesting than the human imagination?

And why would someone become a scientist, essentially playing a lottery that they will discover something huge even though such discoveries are extremely rare?

I don't see how you can come to that conclusion at all. What makes you say that? I see creative achievements in the news much more often than I do science stuff.

As for your anti-science sentiment, I'm not going to comment on that.

People become scientists because they love science, they love learning about the world and they love the intellectual challenge. They don't do it to win a Nobel Prize or whatever. Science is it's own reward.

I think the parallels between scientific discovery and creative endeavors are bigger than the differences.

Both revolve around individuals that would rather do than talk, and both have a long tradition of passing on their knowledge to the next generation.

If you think science is a lottery then I think you are taking the word 'discovery' a bit too literally, think of it as having a hunch and then trying to find out if that hunch is correct or not.

A nice way to see the progression of arts through to science and back again is this chain: cave paintings -> oil paintings -> photograpy -> photography as art.

At ever 'stage change' science was the midwife that gave artists new tools.

I always like to think of a scientist 'discovering' something like a coal miner finding a vein. They didn't just stick a pick in the ground and start digging anywhere. First they saw an odd concentration of coal fragments on top of the soil, they routed through the top soil and found even more. When they dug deeper they found bigger fragments so they staked a claim. They got some buddies together and dug a test shaft and found a vein of coal.

It wasn't a lottery, someone was actually out looking for coal, found coal on the dirt and started to dig a little deeper until they found a vein.

Wait, science isn't creative? Someone go tell Einstein that his bizarre, nonsensical ideas about the universe can't be correct. Warn Galileo that thinking outside the box is anti-science. Let Pasteur know that meat doesn't rot because really small things are eating it.

Science is creative. We just don't usually think of it because science is that crazy thing with math and they like have this "scientific method" that they always follow. But why are experiments actually being carried out? Maybe someone has a crazy theory that under the right circumstances, a liquid can have 0 viscosity and start defying gravity. Or that there are forms of life that don't even need Phosphorous, one of the "key ingredients" to life.

It's constrained creativity. Not much fun.

> It's constrained creativity.

Constrained by the bounds of your imagination and physics. Like errrm.. Art!

> Not much fun.

I think that needs a qualifier: "according to me" or something like that, I personally think science is great fun.

Ballsy thing to type on your own 3000 MHz computer.

That's the kind of balls one earns by skipping too many science classes - one derived from a marginal understanding of the world around them.

Huh? Creativity is what humans do! For everything else we find a way to build machines to do it (or enslave other humans :-)).

There are very good arguments that constrained creativity is the best creativity -- or perhaps the only creativity. Just choosing a medium or style for your art is constraining. Making a web page is constraining, making chocolate cake is constrained by certain parameters.

I think what you're looking for is "expressive" -- and I'd agree, scientific discoveries are by necessity creative, but usually not expressive. But that's not really an aim...

Why are nature and human imagination different things? We are elements of nature as much as everything else. The discovery lottery is not much different than everywhere else. You work very hard on an important problem and if you're extraordinarily lucky then you become famous/get rich/get discovered/land an acquisition.

I think a core similarity with those all is that it's healthier and more fulfilling if you're sustained by the process, not just the wildly rare best-chance ending.

Anyway, why are we being brainwashed to like science? Probably because we, as a society, respect and value the effects that you can trace right back to science. Same with art and creativity, really. If you want to have this argument you've got to get a lot more subtle and talk about real comparisons between the two professions.

> the public is being brainwashed into thinking that science is more important than creative endeavors

1. They aren't.

2. Science is a creative endeavour.

3. If people believe that science is more important than creative endeavours then perhaps it's because science has brought us machines that allow us to fly, little magic boxes you can carry in your pocket that let you talk to someone thousands of miles away, the ability to have sex with a reasonable confidence of not making babies, other little pocket-sized boxes that will capture and replay highly realistic moving pictures, large bridges that don't fall down, people walking on the fucking moon, devices that can see into your body and tell whether you have cancer, other devices that can kill the cancer inside your body if so, things cheap enough for almost everyone to own that will let you travel five times faster than a fast runner for long distances, etc., etc., etc. What you call "creative endeavours" have produced wonderful things too, but if I had to choose between Hamlet and antibiotics I'll go for the millions of lives saved.

> Why is nature more interesting than the human imagination?

More interesting? Well, that's a separate question. To many people it isn't. Those to whom it is have all sorts of different reasons. One would be that nature has a lot more in it than the human imagination. ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy", as one of those creative types made one of his characters say -- though he meant something else.) Another would be that human imagination is limited by, well, human imagination, whereas nature is full of things that no one could have guessed. The moon is kept in its orbit by the same thing that makes an apple fall? Space and time are the same thing, and it's all curved? Light travels from A to B by taking every possible path from A to B and interfering with itself? These things, to someone who's thought about them enough to know what they mean, are astonishing.

> playing a lottery that they will discover something huge

I think you may have bought into the common misconception that all scientific progress is the result of occasional geniuses making huge leaps by the sheer power of their enormous brains. It doesn't really work that way. The advance of science is a collective endeavour; even if you never discover anything huge, you're contributing to it.

(And: why would someone become an artist, musician or author, essentially playing a lottery that they will create something wonderful even though such creations are extremely rare? Most books are unpublishably bad. Most published books are pretty weak. Even of the best published, most will probably be almost completely forgotten in ten years. -- And, again, there's nothing wrong with that: even a not-so-great artistic work enriches the world. And so it is with science.)

> And why would someone become a scientist, essentially playing a lottery that they will discover something huge even though such discoveries are extremely rare?

And why would someone found a startup, essentially playing a lottery that they will discover a huge market even though such discoveries are extremely rare?

Doesn't that sound a little silly?

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