NASA discovers new life form!

[Chutney Daftcraft]

This discovery will be rocking the science community:
Click here: NASA Discovers New Life: Arsenic Bacteria With DNA Completely Alien To What We Know (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/02/nasa-new-life-arsenic-bacteria_n_791094.html)


While the discovery is not extraterrestrial life, NASA has indeed uncovered an entirely new life form on our planet that "doesn't share the biological building blocks of anything currently living" on Earth, Gizmodo reports (http://gizmodo.com/5704158/).I'm not sure what to make of this. If it's a product of evolution then it's the scariest thing I've ever heard.

[Kensey]

Not so much a product of evolution, as a relic of it. In the beginning, probably lots of different biochemical pathways were tried. Ultimately the successful organisms had to either deal with an oxygen-rich environment, or persist in small numbers in out-of-the-way exotic environments like volcanic vents on the ocean floor, mineral lakes, the deserts of Antarctica, etc.

One of the other articles I recently read about this kind of thing, was an attempt to answer the question of why the DNA "alphabet" is so optimized. It's something like 99.7% of the theoretical most optimized code that could possibly exist, and random mutation during reproduction couldn't explain it -- every time computer simulations were run, the researchers ended up with different incompatible codes existing side-by-side. But then somebody thought that perhaps in the early days when everything was single-celled, gene transfer between different organisms (which still happens today) dominated evolution. That team simulated an environment that starts off with many random genetic codes but incorporated "horizontal" gene transfer. Hey presto, not only did the genetic code converge to one universal code, the actual universal code that we know today was a highly favored result.

[Tony]

I just want to know why NASA is involved with this at all. Do they really have bio grants, and bio labs? If so, how much of their budget is spent on bio as opposed to space? Am I just being naive when I think "aeronautics and space" has nothing to do with collecting specimens around the planet?

[Kensey]

NASA has a very compelling interest in collecting unusual life on Earth: it may help us one day identify truly alien life, which is of practical importance since we won't know if astronauts are "clean" after visiting another planet unless we can identify the life they may be bringing back with them. I dunno about anyone else, but I don't like the idea of a Martian bacterial pandemic...

[Tony]

Okay, I'll bite. Realistically, how soon can we expect astronauts to bring back a Martian pandemic? And, since this organism was clearly identifiable as an organism, how does this particular discovery help us against it? I'd be much more impressed if they had discovered that say, granite was alive, since astronauts carrying granite dust would previously have been assumed to be clean.

And still my original question remains. How much of NASA's budget pays for scientists to study life forms on earth?

[Kensey]

Okay, I'll bite. Realistically, how soon can we expect astronauts to bring back a Martian pandemic?

Well, the Bush plan was the Moon by the 2020s but that wasn't completely feasible. Mars would probably take that much longer to get to, assuming we really put the effort in. So figure the Moon by 2035, Mars by 2060.


And, since this organism was clearly identifiable as an organism, how does this particular discovery help us against it?

By helping us find out where our automated tests for microbes may have weaknesses. (A topic debated within and outside NASA at least as far back as the Viking Mars lander missions.)


And still my original question remains. How much of NASA's budget pays for scientists to study life forms on earth?

Well, for FY 2011 the entire NASA budget (http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/420990main_FY_201_%20Budget_Overview_1_Feb_2010.pd f) is $17.78 billion. Out of that, $1.38 billion was for Earth Science, so figure 7.8% of the total NASA budget as a top end for Earth biology.