It’s getting close to two years now since a NASA-funded team of scientists announced they had found a form of life that broke all the rules by using arsenic to build its DNA. It’s become something of an obsession for me. If you want to follow the saga, click here and start back at the earliest post. In July I live-blogged the announcement that other scientists had replicated the experiment and failed to find the same results. In some ways, that was the logical end to the story

My fascination with this story has been tempered from the start by a creepy feeling. As a science writer, I most enjoy reporting on advances in biology: the research that opens up the natural world a little bit wider to our minds. The “#arseniclife” affair was less about biology than about how science gets done and the ways it goes wrong: the serious questions it raised about peer review, replication, and science communication. That fierce debate did some collateral damage. The microbe in question, known as GFAJ-1, went from being the species that would force us to rewrite the biology textbooks to yet another bacterium that offered no serious challenge to the uniformity of life. It became boring.

Continue reading “Weirdly Unweird: A Better End to the #Arseniclife Affair” →

A new look at retracted papers since 1975 paints a picture that’s none too pretty. Retraction rates are zooming up, and most of those retractions, a new study finds, are due to misconduct such as fraud and plagiarism. I write about the study in tomorrow’s New York Times. Check it out.

Originally published October 1, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

As I was putting together a talk today about our microbial world, I just came across this interesting paper in the August issue of The Journal of Virology.

A team of Korean scientists set up some traps to catch viruses and bacteria floating in the air. They set up their traps in Seoul, in an industrial complex in western Korea, and in a forest. Based on their collection, they came up with the following estimates…

Continue reading “The Infected Air (NSFH [Not Safe For Hypochondriacs])” →

This morning I was accused of writing “corporate sponsored blogs whoring themselves out to all and sundry.” Actually, I was arguing that science writers have a duty to call out weak science and press manipulation rather than cave into it. That applies to any kind of research. I happened to be talking about research on genetically modified foods and their health risks. But it applies just as well to pharmaceutical corporations that deep-six drug trials that don’t support their drugs. The most eloquent critic of this bad behavior is Ben Goldacre. You can watch this video of a TED talk he recently gave on the subject, read this essay in the Guardian, or pre-order his new book, Bad Pharma.

If highlighting Goldacre’s vital work means I have to return my gold-plated corporate-whore Corvette, so be it.

[Update: Guardian link fixed, book title fixed]

Originally published September 30, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.

My outburst last week about scientists trying to get reporters to sign a confidentiality agreement to see a paper on genetically modified food landed me on the radio. I spoke to Brooke Gladstone of “On the Media” for this week’s show. I’ve embedded the interview here.

Originally published September 28, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.