Arsenic life does not exist after all...

http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2008/01/extraordinary-c.h...

But the first report about "arsenic-based life" was no more than a preliminary research finding announced in a press event by the study sponsor, and such an announcement is not enough to establish a new body of scientific fact.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

The specific preliminary finding was criticized right away for sloppiness of technique and a rush to reach an unwarranted conclusion,

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/12/its_not_an_arseni...

http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2011/08/first-evidence-...

so the journal slated to publish the preliminary finding had to invite in critiques of the finding to save its own reputation.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/science-publishes-...

Science is all about reproducible results, so much so that there is a humor magazine for scientists called the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

http://www.jir.com/

The headline in New Scientist, a British popular magazine about science (something like Scientific American in the United States), which has been published since before I was born, is correct. There isn't any reliable evidence of arsenic-based life living anywhere within reach of scientists on earth. Not now, and not last year. The best summary of the current evidence, after the efforts of many more careful researchers, is "arsenic life does not exist after all," period (as an American would say), full stop (as a Briton might say).

And then the authors declined to respond in detail to any of the specific criticisms that had been made by other scientists, which is very rarely a good sign.

Soon, there were lots of questions : http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/06/01/return_of_th...

I'm thinking NASA is good at space exploration, not so good at biology.

It would be like a software engineer swapping out their optimized, say, C++ string library, for one that was less optimal but perhaps took less space or ran better in a constrained embedded environment. Arsenic might not be optimal but it's what's available, what can be used.

In the software case you'd probably be OK but run more slowly than otherwise, or else maybe you'd stumble when for some strange reason the sub-optimal string library didn't guarantee thread-safe read operations. The arsenic could similarly trip up the organism in some cases.