The comments are great too. In particular I like what chemDroid had to say:<p><pre><code> Hi. I have posted on many places, they should not be
doing standard DNA preps and the experiment we need
to see is to see a caesium chloride density gradient
ultracentrifugation (not a gel)... If indeed the DNA
has arsenic, it should be getting denser and we would
see that as a band shift. Ethidium bromide's mode of
action would not be affected by arsenic substition.
</code></pre>
Gels are used to measure the length of a DNA fragment. Here's how they work: Ethidium bromide (EtBr) is an intercalating agent -- think of the DNA as a ladder, it slides between the rungs and gets stuck there. EtBr is also luminescent under UV. Agarose (purified seaweed extract) is used to make a gel doped with EtBr. A DNA sample is placed in a well on one end of the gel and an electric current is applied to the gel. The sample gets dragged through the gel, the longer it is, the more slowly it progresses.<p>As chemDroid wrote, there is no reason to believe that arsenic would have any impact on this process.
I'm quite surprised at the amount of work done at NASA to push this paper as something extraordinary without so much as a critical eye. The claim made in the paper is extraordinary and that alone should be reason for caution, not for bringing out the big drums.<p>The bigger problem is that if it turns out the result is bogus this will be a net negative, both for NASA and for the scientific community, the public at large will not see this as proof that 'the system works' but as proof that they were being duped.
You gotta love the peer review process working in public. Now (thanks to the internet) readers correct mistakes so that by the time the paper reaches the journals, it's already been vetted quite a bit. Before that, the public pre-publication vetting process would have been a lot slower (e.g. to be done in conferences) if done at all.
Rosie Redfield is another eurasian government hack scientist operating through colonial Canada. She claims to play the atheist card, but is a known eurasian cheerleader, all those gods be told. Her work is pseudoscience and can never be trusted or taken seriously. Her principle position in America is to take American biology for the holey sleigh ride through eurasian political hierarchy. Fortunately, she has no substantial chance of succeeding.