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NASA’s ‘new form of life’ found in arsenic-rich lake disproven, scientists insist
Two new scientific papers have disproved a controversial claim made by NASA-funded scientists in 2010 that a new form of bacterial life had been discovered that could thrive on arsenic.
“Contrary to an original report, the new research clearly shows that the bacterium, GFAJ-1, cannot substitute arsenic for phosphorus to survive,” said a statement by the US journal Science, a prestigious, peer-reviewed magazine.
Science published the much-hyped initial study in December 2010, with lead researcher Felisa Wolfe-Simon, then a fellow in NASA’s astrobiology program, announcing that a new form of life had been scooped from a California lake.
NASA has conducted numerous probes at eastern California’s Mono Lake, an unusually salty body of water with high arsenic and mineral levels, as it is likely to reflect conditions under which early life evolved on Earth, or perhaps Mars.
Famed SETI astronomer retiring, says discovery of alien life ‘very close’
Jill Tarter has devoted most of her adult life to the mission of scanning the sky, in the hopes of one day discovering a signal from above that would finally reveal that human beings are not alone in the universe.
One of the world’s most famous astronomers, she has spent nearly 30 years as the director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the world’s preeminent scientific organization devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and astrobiology, or simply, the evidence of aliens.
“Everybody who is working in the field of exoplanet detection can almost taste it,” said Ms. Tarter, who was the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the sci-fi film Contact. “We’re very close. We’re going to have a rocky planet the size of the Earth, at a distance from a star that’s like the sun, where liquid water is plausible on the surface. (Photos: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images; Wikimedia Commons/Hat Creek Radio Observatory)
