, 1967). Ledoux et al. (1974)

expanded the experiments and found that the donor DNA from thiamine plus E. coli and not that from a thiamine minus mutant bacterial strain converted the plant to a thiamine plus condition. These results could not be reproduced in St. Louis or elsewhere (Lurquin, 2001), even with seeds and DNA provided by Ledoux. At one stage, Ledoux suggested that maybe cosmic gamma irradiation in the airplanes during trans-Atlantic flights inactivated the activity. Lurquin (2001) provides selleck chemicals untestable alternative hypotheses that the data were faked by Ledoux himself or by a staff member in Belgium who wished to please his boss. This is the only one of the five cases we are considering in this report where cheating is thought (but not proven) to have occurred. For the other four, it was probably merely self-delusion, which is the definition of beyond the fringe science. A recent example indicating that beyond the fringe science is alive and still with us came with the claim that arsenic could ‘substitute for’ or ‘replace’ phosphorus in the DNA of a newly isolated bacterial strain (Wolfe-Simon et al., PD0325901 mouse 2011; published in ScienceExpress online on 2 December 2010). A blog posting criticizing the Wolfe-Simon

et al.’s article appeared 2 days later, on 4 December 2010 (http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html). Then, science writer Carl Zimmer (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/12/this_paper_should_not_have_been_published.html) headlined ‘This paper should not have been published’ and ‘Scientists see fatal flaws in NASA study of arsenic-based life’ just 5 days after online publication in Science. Zimmer used inverted commas to indicate that the first headline was a quote from a source (cited at the bottom of his sixth paragraph). The Slate article covers all of the basic reasoning showing that the article was beyond PIK-5 the fringe. There were other published criticisms. For example, Silver & Phung (2011) wrote a brief summary 3 weeks after

the initial online publication stating that the report was ‘science fiction’ rather than science. Much later, Matthew Herper in Forbes magazine headlined ‘New science papers prove NASA failed big time in promoting supposedly Earth-shaking discovery that wasn’t’ at http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2012/07/08/new-science-papers-prove-nasa-failed-big-time-in-promoting-supposedly-earth-shaking-discovery-that-wasnt/. The scientific community usually does not use popular magazines as sources of understanding (although beyond the fringe science frequently does), and blogs and tweets are new. However, for arsenic in DNA, it was the authors and their government-funding agency NASA that used rapid Internet vehicles to communicate their ideas, which were then uniformly judged as beyond the fringe. What had happened? Wolfe-Simon et al.