Slinging it further -- the arsenic bacteria saga continues

Well, we're not gone traveling yet -- and the arsenic bacteria saga continues.   Naturally enough, for a paper whose publication was preceded by such hype -- and followed by such immediate, justified skepticism.  Today's Science has an interview with Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the principal author of the paper that made such a splash a few weeks ago, and engendered such immediate skepticism, for many reasons, including that the experiment was inadequately controlled.  In brief, Wolfe-Simon is exhausted, and still hoping to collaborate with others who can confirm, or not, the findings she reported.  But being a true-blooded product of our culture, naturally she defends her results (graduate schools must train people to say a lot of things, but never "I was wrong!").

We won't go into any detail about the arguments here, because that's already being done much better elsewhere than we could do but we did want to include links here to some of that give-and-take, since we did post on the subject when the paper first came out.  Microbiologist Rosie Redfield's posts on  her blog, including the most recent very detailed response here, and reader comments, are of particular interest, as she goes point by point through the original paper, as well as the authors' attempts to answer skepticism, which they do here.

So far, without the additional carefully done experimental results that doubters are hoping to provide and/or analyze, it looks to us as though, at best, the jury is still out on these arsenic bacteria, and at worst, the original experiments were poorly carried out, poorly interpreted, and poorly reviewed.

And, as we said when we originally commented on this work, even if it were solid science, it doesn't say anything about life in space.  So NASA's Baloney campaign on its behalf should remain pilloried -- and it was NASA, not Wolfe-Simon who got the hype engine going on this one.  NASA seems to be good at engineering, but they should stay out of the basic biology business.  NSF should fund that.  'Astrobiology' is, if anything, a political wing of theirs, and Congress should remove its funding.  We know several good scientists who feed at that trough, but they'd still do good work funded in more conventional ways.  A truly disinterested panel could go through the current portfolio, transfer what's worthy to NSF, and put the rest to rest.

Science baloney is not new.  Legitimate as well as bogus scientists have long known that they can get ahead by dissembling, self-promotion, and puffing up their work in order to get attention, support, publication, or sales.  It's always up to the community to purge and self-police.   These days, the media (including many journals and even funding agencies) flood us with such puffery.  That we will not likely restrain over-claims should not stop us from resisting it, in the name of good science.

Health story of the day -- Java jolt cures Alzheimer's!

Here's a particularly cruel health result of the day, it seems to us. The BBC reports that coffee may reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's, at least in mice force-fed the equivalent of 5 cups a day (or 2 lattes, 14 cups of tea, or 20 soft drinks -- wait, didn't we recently learn from the BBC that people who drink that much cola are susceptible to hypokalemic periodic paralysis?).

The new story says that caffeine seems to prevent plaques from forming in the brain, the 'hallmark' of the disease, or reduce those already there. Oddly, other researchers have found that these plaques are neither always found in people who had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, nor are they always associated with dementia when they are found. So reporters aren't doing their job and/or researchers enjoying the limelight aren't coming clean (assuming they at least know their job).

This is a perfect example of a story prematurely reported about a scary disease, and thus that will sell. Because it will sell. Everyone fears losing their memory as they age, and quick and easy cures are surely eagerly sought by caretakers and the affected alike. Many have seen the awfulness of close and loved relatives with this disorder.

But mice are not people, and the dementia bred into an inbred strain of mice cannot be assumed to be the dementia any of our grandparents suffer or suffered from. As with all 'simple' diseases, the more researchers learn about dementias in people, the more questions they have--indeed, 'Alzheimer's' has always been a diagnosis of exclusion (that is, impossible to confirm until after death), and the signature amyloid plaques in the brain that were assumed to confirm the diagnosis on autopsy have been shown to be non-confirmatory after all. The idea of Alzheimer's itself as a single definable disease is fading within the research community as more is learned about dementias (unless perhaps your lab is committed to the line of inbred Alzheimeric mice it took you years to breed).

So, once again, scientists prematurely rush to the press with a story that may well cause caretakers to force-feed elderly patients with caffeine at best, and at worse cruelly encourage hope of a cure where in fact there is none. We write often about oversimplifying genetic determinism, but this is a case about oversimplifying environmental determinism--a problem that actually predated genetic determinism in the history of 20th century epidemiology. Surely by now both researcher and media should know better than to hype such claims.

There are many ways to get dementia. There are also many ways to get your morning energy boost even if tea, say, won't help your state of mind without drowining you or making you park all day in the bathroom. And there are many ways to spin a story to the news media.

But don't forget to have your coffee....or you'll forget to have your coffee!

Right.