Some of you may be aware that yesterday NASA announced that they had discovered a new form of life, a life form built out of arsenic. Arsenic as we all know is a poison and if ingested in high quantities can be fatal. So just how is this life form surviving?
First let us look at the life form, a newly discovered microbe called GFAJ-1. This microbe is a new strain of a common group of bacteria called Gammaproteobacteria and what it does is something quite remarkable. It substitutes one of the building blocks of life, as we previously knew it, with arsenic.
Life such as us is made up of six elements; carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. The one that this microbe replaces is phosphorus. Phosphorus, for those who didn’t do chemistry at school, comes in several forms. The common one that we as teenagers may have come into contact with is the solid white stone that has to be kept in water. This is to stop it spontaneously combusting on contact with air. When present in our bodies it helps to form our DNA and our cell membrane as well as doing other useful things such as forming our bones and metabolising calcium, glucose and protein.
The microbe, found in Mono Lake, California can build its cells and therefore its DNA out of arsenic. In laboratory conditions, researchers present the microbe at first with a “diet” that was very thin on phosphorus but high on arsenic and observed that it still grew. They then removed the phosphorus, leaving it only with the arsenic and it still continued to thrive. When they looked into the organisms cells they discovered that the arsenic was indeed being used to construct things such as its DNA and the cell membranes.
I think this is brilliant, but not unexpected. Perhaps it is because I’m a lifelong science fiction fan, but to me life should not exist only using the six elements that we are made of. With the universe being such an incomprehensible size, life simply has to be infinitely varied. Life is a highly adaptable thing and to me the thought that all life has to be like us is more than a little narrow minded.
NASA has said that this will open their minds to the different possible forms of life. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t think that life would have found different ways to evolve. Maybe it’s fanciful but why can’t we have life made out of zinc instead of carbon? Or fluorine instead of oxygen? Life probably isn’t restricted to the physical form that we and life on our planet is found in. It could be made of gas or water or have no physical form at all, a being of pure consciousness, although I have no idea how you would prove it was even there.
I do doubt that in my lifetime NASA will find such life. For a start they would probably have to have left this planet in order to find the new conditions where it could be possible. All of this is of course in the future, a future I would give anything to see. Until then NASA will keep looking on our world for different forms of life. The fact that they are still finding new things on this planet delights me. Long may their search continue. Well done NASA and all its scientists.
You can find out more on this subject by visiting nasa.gov
Credits: thanks to NASA for information provided in this piece regarding the microbe and Yahoo answers for the affects of phosphorus in out bodies.
Nikki McLean - I am who I am; an ambidextrous dyslexic and you're just going to have to deal with me.
Join the Conversation