I was always terrible at the video game "defender". But that didn't appear to be an impediment this morning. My thesis defense went well, so while there are administrative details pending it seems I am now "Dr. Dorn".

In case anyone's been wondering where I've been ... my Ph.D. thesis (a dissertation, to those outside of the sciences) is due this week. Well, actually last week, depending on who you talk to. So... you understand.

The cover article of the February issue of Discover Magazine, out this week, is about research using Avida, the digital life / artificial evolutionary biology research platform I use for my work. There are six main sections of the article, and one of them is devoted entirely to my research in astrobiology! The article is written by Carl Zimmer, one of the biggest science writers in America.

So, I have a question. Should I be:

1. Overjoyed that my graduate work is receiving national attention in the country's foremost popular publication about science.
2. Annoyed that they screwed up their description of my basic premise and made a scientifically inaccurate statement about it despite attempts to correct it both with the author during the interview and with Discover's fact-checker during a phone conversation a month later.

I guess I'm feeling both emotions. If you're curious about the error, it is this: I am studying the problem of how to detect the chemical signs of extraterrestrial lifeforms in a way that works regardless of those lifeforms' biochemistry. For example, we use proteins as cellular machinery. What if E.T. used something else? What if alien biology used proteins, but made them from a different set of amino acids than the 20 we use? What if it lived in ammonia instead of water and used silicon compounds for cell walls and membranes, instead of fats and sugars? Could we still detect its presence using chemical analysis? Can we do it with an automated rover? I think we can. Anyhow, this can be summed up as "detecting lifeforms regardless of their biochemistry". The article persists in wording this (over my protests) as "detecting lifeforms that aren't DNA-based".

That's irritating because nothing in my work has ever involved DNA or any nucleic acid. Not once. The premise has absolutely nothing to do with DNA, at least not in specific or relative to any other biomolecule. Whether an organism is "DNA-based" isn't relevant to my argument: one could conceivably design a biochemistry which used DNA for genomic information storage, but for which the rest of biochemistry was totally different. Such an organism might be "DNA-based", but would still require the kind of analysis I study in my thesis work because normal biological experiments wouldn't show anything. DNA or not, you couldn't grow these hypothetical alien bugs on an agar plate.