Announcements at press conferences and a rapid dissemination of claims on YouTube, the blogosphere, and twiiterverse are the new normal 3MA for beyond the fringe science. There was an immediate flood of e-mails and blog comments (newer means of science

communications), which were without exception highly negative. Wolfe-Simon et al. (2011) made the new strain available to other researchers including us and cooperated with advice as to how to grow this gammaproteobacterium (the same group as E. coli). Phung et al. (2012) determined the entire 3.5-Mbp bacterial genome and placed the data in GenBank, available to all. Science writer Pennisi commented at http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/12/genomecontroversial-arsenic-bacterium-sequenced. Kim & Rensing (2012) analyzed arsenic resistance and arsenic metabolism-related genes, and Elias et al. (2012) used the annotation to isolate a gene for a periplasmic phosphate-binding protein. The protein gene product was purified and shown to discriminate www.selleckchem.com/products/bgj398-nvp-bgj398.html against arsenate and in favor of phosphate by about 10× better than the comparable E. coli phosphate-binding protein. This helps explain the arsenate resistance of the strain, but does not contribute to the question of replacement of phosphate in DNA by arsenate. Rosemary J. Redfield of the University of British Columbia who had taken a lead in the early blog analysis (http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html)

was coauthor of the report by Reaves et al. (2012) showing the absence of detectible arsenic in purified DNA from this bacterial isolate. A second report in the same issue of Science (Erb et al., 2012) also failed to detect arsenic in bacterial DNA. It is accepted that the responsibility for a published report is fully that of all authors and not of the journal publication process or the government agencies supporting the research. However, problems with peer review and publishing could be usefully considered for the examples described above. For water with memory, I suggest that an additional problem was hubris by Nature Editor John Maddox, Thiamet G who authored a follow-up report (Maddox et al., 1988) entitled ‘“High-dilution”

experiments a delusion’ less than a month after the initial beyond the fringe publication. It was known to be a delusion when the initial paper was published, but publishing gets you headlines and television coverage. The results in Davenas et al. (1988) could not be duplicated in Benveniste’s laboratory in the presence of the team of Maddox et al. (1988). Benveniste accurately complained on the next page in Nature that it was a ‘trap set by a squad’ (a dog and pony show in American usage) consisting of an editor seeking publicity, a professional magician whose occupation was to catch science fraud and a self-selected USA NIH specialist on fraud and misconduct. The dog and pony show as described by Maddox et al. (1988) seems very vigilante‎-like, as Benveniste complained.