She appeared like a shot out of the blogosphere: a wild-haired Canadian microbiologist with a propensity to say what was on her mind. And on 4 December 2010, what was on Rosie Redfield's mind was arsenic - specifically, a paper published two days earlier in Science, in which researchers funded by NASA claimed to have found bacteria that could incorporate arsenic into their DNA in place of phosphorus (F. Wolfe-Simon et al. Science 332,1163-1166; 2010). If true, the finding showed that life could be supported by a form of biochemistry radically different from the one we know.
展开▼
