Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Update - NASA's New Life?!

This evening I took a break from wrapping Christmas Presents and learning 2D NMR theory to just check the basic Yahoo news.  And to my surprise, NASA's new life form which I previously wrote about is in the news again.  This time, scientists are finding major holes into their research findings.  A really good, scientific review of the paper published by NASA researchers was posted on a blog by Dr. Rosemary J. Redfield.  It is an excellent analysis of NASA's work and it claims that NASA was sloppy.  There are many outlined flaws (such as execution of assays, to the starving of the organisms from phosphorous but leaving traces of phosphate salt within the experiment).

The most interesting comment by Dr. Redfield was, "If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I'd send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls."  To say this about our most famous research and scientific organization in the country and probably the world, is shocking but true.  I have asked for advice from professors and graduate students alike, and they all have one thing to say in common..."Make sure your controls are sound!"  I am a little disappointed that NASA's astrobiologists failed at such a simple research philosophy.

Check out the NASA report here.

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