Arsenate-based DNA: a big idea with big holes

given the recent (valid) criticisms of this work, I find it amazing that NASA and the lead author (Felisa Wolfe-Simon) keep feeding the general media by pushing this result as a major scientific breakthrough... without publicly addressing any of these concerns<p>here's another piece that was submitted to HN earlier today: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1972124" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1972124</a>

It won't be long until we get some lab that tries to replicate the findings to publish, I would guess that at least several of them are in the race right now to be #2 to either conclusively prove that it is real (which I doubt) or to be the one to solidly nail the mistakes.

Perhaps claims of arsenate-based DNA will go the way of "cold fusion" when some control experiments (as described in the blog post) show the bacteria had phosphate-based DNA after all.