The team's findings are yet to be verified.
Sigh. Nine years, no independent verification. For reproducible incredibly unique behavior like that? Verification of a real phenomenon would be massive and immediate.
Sigh. Nine years, no independent verification. For reproducible incredibly unique behavior like that? Verification of a real phenomenon would be massive and immediate.
They published it on 1 Sep. 2010. Give them some time.
And if they do, they might simply be extremophiles, see above. Something isn't 'normal earth life' because you say so, something isn't earth life because you show it to reproduce (not because you say so) and because you prove that after you've conclusively proven that it indeed does reproduce does not contain any of our normal DNA, which should be fairly trivial.
Then you make samples available for each and every lab in the world that wants a slice of they pie by reproducing your results.
Research in isolation tends to produce un-reproducible results, the guy that did the original research is heavily involved in this effort so it does not count as any confirmation of the earlier claims.
Remember: Pons, Fleischmann, Percival Lowell, Hwang Woo-suk and many many others.
While slow, I can see how something like this would need heavily evidence-supported data to be even remotely non-laughable in even scientific communities.
Now I'm not disagreeing in saying that proving something "simple" like, say, the ability for the cells to reproduce at 121C could be somewhat easily verified, but usually with things like this just verifying something like that isn't grounds for publication by any means.
It's not that it's not interesting, but we're trying to prove that these are extraterrestrial life forms here. They're going to definitely want to prove, independently, the whole (likely) bundle of proposed theories, such as the fluorescence possibly linking them to (in the article) the Red Rectangle, plus verification that they do not have any type of DNA or RNA (harder than you'd think), plus other behaviorial/evolutionary traits not yet discovered before they consider it "proven" or otherwise.
To say that since one cannot be verified, thus it is all irrelevant or false is just impatience. Work with a grad student sometime who is pursuing their dissertation, haha.
If these things actually reproduce, couldn't they give some to someone else? That someone else could then check to see if the things behave as reported. The "came from space" claim is more difficult to verify, but the other things (e.g. no DNA and no RNA) should be easy to check, and are interesting in their own right.
Incorrect. Something involving alien life, comets, etc? Scientists run the other way.
In a sense, this publication is verification by scientists in the UK of a previous paper by Dr. Louis that described the cells/particles/whatever reproducing at high temperature.
If the cells are of extraterrestrial origin and are not DNA-based, this will be the scientific discovery of the century. One would hope that other labs will step forward and attempt to reproduce the work.
Take any of the phenomenon described, say "organisms that reproduce at 121 degrees" Send samples out, samples are reheated, other independent scientists verify this cause and effect.
Sure, the entire set of wild claims would take a heckuva lot of verification. But any one of the claims? Dead simple. Why don't we have independent verification of dead simple things? Probably because there is no verification to be had, sadly.
Agreed, it would have been nice if the Dr. Louis had sent samples to any lab that would take them, but instead he sent them to just one lab.
Besides a possible lack of labs volunteering, perhaps he was motivated to retain as much credit for what he felt would be an important discovery.
In any case, I still would like to see some other facilities step forward and attempt to verify the work.
You seem to think that the normal practice is to get widespread experimental confirmation before publication of any kind. It isn't. The point of scientific publishing is to make a result available for verification or invalidation by people who have no connection with the original experimenter. In peer-reviewed journals the referees serve this purpose, but there is nothing wrong with offering up the result for testing by others, especially since the required equipment is available in just about any biology lab.
Your original comment complaining about 'nine years with no verification' suggests you thought the scientists in question had been making these claims since the red rain fell back in 2001. this is not the case either.
I don't think that Dr. Louis gets to verify his own work.
If you find it on earth there is a bit of problem with right away drawing the conclusion that it is alien in nature. You could say the same thing about any other life on earth, or at least the initial life forms that gave rise to all the others. Just because it 'rained down' doesn't make it alien right away (rain contains tons of bacteria, in fact bacteria play a large role in the formation of rain! http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/99093.php).
There exists such a thing as an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile , an organism that lives in conditions not normally associated with life.
These are quite fascinating, but still use 'our' DNA, it would not be too farfetched to suggest that an even earlier branch of life, split off before DNA was nailed down managed to live in some forgotten corner of our biosphere.
Most - but not all - geneticists agree that before we had the current 4 base DNA there may have been one using only 2 bases, so the evolutionary machinery itself is evolving as well.
It could be that if you go another step backwards, that you end up with cell like structures that have no DNA but that can still replicate. Certain clays have this capability, as Richard Dawkins noted in 'the blind watchmaker', and there are other variations on this theme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis