Did “go fever” push NASA to publicly announce science to the MSM that wasn’t well peer reviewed?
WUWT readers may recall that I conjectured about the cryptic press release NASA made last week that set the blogosphere afire. See NASA’s extraterrestrial buzz where the press release announced:
NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Well newsflash there G-men, it was more terrestrial than extraterrestrial, and now it appears the science behind the press release may be seriously flawed.
It seems that in their flawed zeal to get some press coverage, NASA again has egg of their faces, reminiscent of the Mars fossil microbe fiasco. It’s more “science by press release” gone wild. Slate.com has a scathing review of the fire that is raging in the microbiology camp over this press release:
“It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado…
Of course if that was any of us saying the same thing about climate science, somebody would immediately label us “anti-science deniers”. Lets see if somebody comes up with a label for these people asking skeptical questions. Maybe “anti NASA space bug deniers”?
WUWT reader “NoAstonomer” tips us to the fray in progress saying:
The microbiology blogosphere is currently ripping this study apart:
http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html
http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/
http://scienceblogs.com/webeasties/2010/12/if_you_read_alex_bradleys.php
Here’s an excerpt from Slate.com :
In fact, says Harvard microbiologist Alex Bradley, the NASA scientists unknowingly demonstrated the flaws in their own experiment. They immersed the DNA in water as they analyzed it, he points out. Arsenic compounds fall apart quickly in water, so if it really was in the microbe’s genes, it should have broken into fragments, Bradley wrote Sunday in a guest post on the blog We, Beasties. But the DNA remained in large chunks—presumably because it was made of durable phosphate. Bradley got his Ph.D. under MIT professor Roger Summons, a professor at MIT who co-authored the 2007 weird-life report. Summons backs his former student’s critique.
But how could the bacteria be using phosphate when they weren’t getting any in the lab? That was the point of the experiment, after all. It turns out the NASA scientists were feeding the bacteria salts which they freely admit were contaminated with a tiny amount of phosphate. It’s possible, the critics argue, that the bacteria eked out a living on that scarce supply. As Bradley notes, the Sargasso Sea supports plenty of microbes while containing 300 times less phosphate than was present in the lab cultures.
And “NoAstronomer” adds:
Yet some with no expertise in the field stick with the original story. Phil Plaitt at Bad Astronomy notes how he has to trust the peer review process…
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/12/07/arsenic-and-old-universe/
But what happens if/when you realize that the process is broken, at least in this case? Can people take a step back and wonder if maybe the process failed in other cases too?
Get a load of this response:
“We cannot indiscriminately wade into a media forum for debate at this time,” declared senior author Ronald Oremland of the U.S. Geological Survey. “If we are wrong, then other scientists should be motivated to reproduce our findings. If we are right (and I am strongly convinced that we are) our competitors will agree and help to advance our understanding of this phenomenon. I am eager for them to do so.”
Umm, well, sir, small point: You and colleagues at USGS and NASA created a veritable firestorm of speculation and coverage with the cryptic press release and “embargoed” story in Science Magazine. Plus a live webcast, and NASA TV live, and now you say “We cannot indiscriminately wade into a media forum for debate at this time,”?
Dude, that ship has sailed. GMAFB!
Gosh, this pattern seems familiar. NASA trumpets these news worthy pieces in a “science by press release” after they pushed the peer review process to where if failed to catch the obvious, and then when called on it, they ignore any criticism.
Yes, the question is, how did this new train wreck get past peer review? Given the urgency attached to the press release by NASA, it certainly looks to me like NASA simply threw caution to the wind again. It seems to be another case of “go fever” that doomed Apollo 1, Challenger, and made them look like fools again following the embarrassing Mars fossil microbe debacle.
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Black Sabbath says: December 7, 2010 at 9:18 pm
I think that this is quite right. But the difference between Arsenicgate and cAGW isn’t only grant money.
Fundementally, the arsenic story is is interesting but won’t change anyone’s life. The cAGW myth has already changed the lives of millions (and will continue to do so for years to come.) Some have been plunged into fuel poverty, have lost their jobs, been denied hope. Others have cleaned up. (Think of the Goreacle.)
And, like the most successful hoaxes, it plays on the prejudices of many media people, politicians and, yes, scientists. That’s why cAGW has become “The Consensus”, and why scientists in fields other than Climatology have avoided or refused to spend a few hours looking at how Hansen, Mann, Jones and all the rest have been operating.
I’m afraid that, come the day of reckoning, many genuine but ‘non-involved’ scientists will have a tough time dealing with the backlash which is coming their way.
Bacterial leaching of refractory ores has been around for some time. The process uses bacteria to oxidize the sulfur component from pyrites, including arsenical pyrite. I understand that the bacteria involved in the process thrives in the presence of high levels of arsenic.
And we should be paying these govt. scientists 6 figure plus salaries because they are the ‘experts’.
I was quite amazed by that story too. The explanation is more plausible than that in the paper which seems fatally poisoned by arsenic.
Maybe we should call them the Arsenics.
More bad science from NASA – no surprise there then. This is the inevitable result of what happens when science is prostrated to politics. Without government grants many scientisits will fall off the gravey train.
“Egg of their faces” should be “Egg on their faces”.
As is common for Randal, xkcd managed to have a strip about the press conference the next day: http://www.xkcd.com/829/
But it’s one thing for a cartoonist to be quick to draw (sorry), and something else again for researchers.
Anthony, I was laughing out loud at ANOTHER NASA screwup! Until you had to remind me of Apollo 1 and Challenger, which are the classic examples of where NASA screwed up on both the science AND the engineering in their haste for a public relations coup. People died there. Here, people will not die (thank God), but it is just another embarrassment for these guys again. It may be time to reorganize NASA into a different type of agency, hopefully better than this crew. And these are the guys who would be organizing a trip to Mars? If I’m an astronaut, I’m quaking in my boots and not wanting to be picked for that mission.
Why am I not surprised? I watched that “scientist” present her “findings” and told my wife it smelt more like a political PR stunt than science, let’s wait and see what turns out.
Turns out we didn’t have to wait too long. Glad my crap-detector is still working.
The current state of NASA’s reputation is just sad when I think back to the heady days of the historic moon landing. A friend and I organised a 35 mm SLR camera and tripod to properly capture those grainy monochrome shots on our single channel from the NZ state broadcaster. Even the camera was pretty advanced at the time!
It seems that the really good science is now being done by big corporations churning out the Next Big Thing for endless consumer consumption.
This paper was rather more obviously flawed than the comments here would suggest.
The concept behind the paper was to demonstrate that life on other planets would be far more likely because it implied that rather than requiring carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphor the last of these could no longer be considered necessary for life. Which was handy, because it happens that phosphor is by far the least abundant of these elements (about 100x less abundant than the others). Problem is that the bacteria isn’t simply using any old element to replace phosphor – it can only use arsenic because it happens to be in the same column of the periodic table – and arsenic is 1000x less abundant than phosphor on planet earth (and 10,000 times less abundant in the rest of the solar system, a natural consequence of its higher atomic number). So, even if the paper was based on fact the attempt to use it to demonstrate an increased likelihood of life on other planets was fatally flawed.
The bacteria maybe able to eat cake, rather than bread, but it seems bread is still far easier to come by. (oh, and don’t forget, you need to get the temperature EXACTLY right – but that’s another story).
I haven’t followed this controversy or read the original paper. Most of the P in a bacterium is found in ribosomal RNA. Forget about DNA, it would be really amazing if functional rRNA could be made with arsenic, not P. At some point, the authors should do a simple stoichiometric balance. How much P was in the system and how much bacterial growth and mass did they get? Not sure why the authors did not get closer to 0 concentration of phosphorus in their system. This will a case where new experiments in the next weeks and months will provide clear answers to what is going on.
I note that the corresponding author for the Science paper gives a gMail address.
Does that strike anyone else as unusual? Or am I behind the times?
NASA does political BS these days, science not so much so.
“Of course if that was any of us saying the same thing about climate science, somebody would immediately label us ‘anti-science deniers’. Lets see if somebody comes up with a label for these people asking skeptical questions. Maybe ‘anti NASA space bug deniers’?”
If NASA and the rest of the world government elites can figure out how to move from this one microbe to an urgent global call for command and control economy, then rest assured that the microbiology community will suddenly come under fire as surely as climate skeptics have. As of now, there’s no money in it.
Dr S who has been continually warning us about NASA press releases over the last couple of years.
Come on ethical scientists (I’m sure most of you are). Time to self-regulate and admit the system is broken. You need to find real governance, quickly, before you lose the little faith the general public still amazingly seems to have in you.
Science has been hopelessly contaminated by advocates and ideologues. Peer review should be abandoned altogether, and all grants revoked pending an extensive forensic review by external auditors. There are no scientific experts any longer; just advocates for a particular point of view. What a sham.
Science has become a joke. Time for the inmates to take over the asylum.
On the bright side, the lower they go the stronger the case and will for reform. One would have hoped that they would be desperate to show CAGW was a one off mistake, and the rest of their research was worthy of funding. With the space program being outsourced they could end up being cut down to a simple financing department.
Are you suggesting this was an As-inane paper?
Dixon, your comment on “self governance” is appropriate.. however.. given the inability of modern society to govern ethically no matter what accountability measures are in place (the US Constitution, for example), do you think there is any hope for self governance with an “open enrollment”… Folks have put their agenda above the science (and for that matter their ethics), I don’t see a path to accountability, other than the blogs like WUWT. Can you imagine if there were no blogs, most of this bad science would be presented and accepted, and it would be very difficult for dissenting opinions to be heard. It goes to show how important the blog culture (and internet) really is. Thank you Al Gore!
Did Neanderthals Have Rock Concerts?
Of course they did, it was the stone age after all.
So NASA takes something that was done decades ago, and still screws the basic story line up.
Then tries to spin it that because these bugs have found a different ‘food’, they could
exist somewhere else…..
…..where that food is even more rare
and people actually think government health care is a good thing
It gets worse. From crap science to even crappier reporting. Truly beyond crap squared. These moron reporters are trying to imply that the bug evolved de novo, as opposed to being FORCED to incorporate the arsenic into its DNA (if it actually did) after having evolved along with the rest of us life forms over the past hundreds of millions of years. Oh, and thereby proving that God is dead.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/04/does-a-new-life-form-mean-god-is-dead/
Maybe I’m the moron, and should be a bit more cynical as in – the progressive liberal media or even the fake progressive liberal media have proved that God doesn’t exist. NASA says so, and the science is settled, so run along now, be an atheist and vote progressive liberal or, failing that, vote fake progressive liberal (martini marxist for Lord Monckton readers). Anyone who disagrees must be a creationist, redneck, moose-shooting, bible thumping Republican.
I actually feel sorry for the authors, in a similar way to feeling sorry for Phil Jones when I watch his sorry ass on YouTube videos.
Anyway, due to travel commitments, this Ph.D. DNA chemist hasn’t yet read the paper. I was looking forward to seeing some high level mass spec data with signals for all 4 “nucleotides” with an arsenic atom correctly linked in one form or another to the 5′- or 3′- end of the nucleoside. I guess I’m not going to find that then ?? Even 1% incorporation of arsenate in place of the phosphate in DNA or RNA would’ve been kinda cool.
“this is not the NASA I knew in my youth, when they put a man on the moon”
Indeed. In those days, NASA was lead by German rocket engineers. NASA never fully recovered from the death of Wernher Von Braun.