Some of the things I have been reading describe the discovery as a "bombshell", something that "upends long-held assumptions about the basic building blocks of life".
Okay, but scientists, won't you please tell me what those assumptions are and what it means that they have been upended?
It is statements like these that drive me batty: "It is unlike every other lifeform on the planet - from the simplest plant to the most complex mammal."
Whoa! So it's like an alien, right? Something that comes from a different tree of life? That would indeed be bombshelltastic.
I cannot remember being more excited about a piece of news than I was at 2pm on Thursday. The sorts of discoveries that turn over worldviews and give one a sense of the boundless mystery surrounding us don't happen every decade.
Then trusty Dr. Krulwich, science-explainer extraordinaire, helps disambiguate the discovery:
Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon fed a little bacterium daily doses of the dread element, and the little guy slurped it up, chucked most of its phosphorous, and became an arsenic-creature. "It's a really nice story about adaptability of our life form," chemist Gerald Joyce told the New York Times.
Ugh. Punch in the gut. So the Discovery Of The Century is merely a "nice story" about OUR adaptability? I want to throw something.
[Note that I am still totally unclear on how to interpret this, I am only reacting to various news snippets at this point.]
This leaves me feeling like I have just been violated by a bunch of nerds in lab coats. Apparently what the scientists meant by "bombshell" and "revolutionary" is that an experimenter found something they didn't expect. Has science become that boring that we use words like "bombshell" to describe a surprise?
I should backtrack and say that it does seem pretty interesting and important that a lifeform is able to live off an element that up to now we thought was poison -- my beef at this point is mainly word choice. If I understand the discovery correctly (and let me remind you, that's a big "if"), this is more like discovering life that can live without the sun (which we've already discovered, by the way) than like discovering a lifeform that has a completely different structure than the DNA-based cellular structure present in every known creature, which I was hoping/expecting would be the case. And that hope/expectation is undoubtedly the reason behind my discontent.
I will conclude by saying that the best thing to come out of this shebang for me has been reading Krulwich's post, which explains the very real possibility that, under the right conditions, clouds (yes, clouds) could become intelligent living things.
A living thing, it is thought, needs to feed, grow, copy and evolve and persist. It needs some kind of shape. Clouds can do all that, says David Grinspoon. Though they look hazy and random here on Earth, they contain levels of order, they hold themselves together, they move around, they have routines. They can, in theory, produce increasingly complex forms of themselves.
Still the intellectual concept that bothers me more than any other is the inability to separate life from non-life. Xan has some interesting comments on the topic in the comments of this post.
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Update 12/5: Now there are questions about the findings.
There's been a lot of hype around the news of GFAJ-1, the microbe claimed to substitute arsenate for phosphate in its DNA. In the midst of all the excitement, one thing has been overlooked:
The claim is almost certainly wrong.
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If you made it this far, you may also be interested in this survey about life forms or this Q&A with ecologist Rob Dunn.
