What are the odds?

In its breathless way, the New York Times reports today that it is shocked, shocked, at the controversy surrounding the report of arsenic replacing phosphorus in a bacterium (original NYT article; paper's PMID 21127214). (Read the commentary if you don't think the editors were fooled). I saw the original story and thought, "life is too short to worry about this kind of bullsh*t."

My favorite sentence in the original article was:

"Then Felisa found them!" said Dr. Davies

And I was all excited for a while until I read that

Dr. Joyce, however, said that the experimenters had yet to provide a “smoking gun” that there was arsenic in the backbone of working DNA.

And I thought, WTF!

What has become of Science?
I'm very happy to see that my friend (does she remember me?) Rosie Redfield is all over it (here). Go get 'em.