Discoverer Asks for Time, Patience Over Arsenic Bacteria Controversy

摘要

Three weeks ago, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, 33, a former performance oboist with a doctorate in oceanography and a NASA fellowship in astrobiology, published a paper in Science about bacteria that can use arsenic instead of phosphorus in DNA and other biomol-ecules. Four days before the publication, NASA sent out a media advisory that it would hold a press briefing "to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." That led to wild speculations on the Web about extraterrestrial life, and when the paper was published, many headlines made the most of the "alien" nature of the discovery by Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California.