Isn’t this slightly presumptious? How do you know what extraterrestrial life would look like under a microscope?
Then you should read it again. Cecil’s article affirms that several tests conducted by different researchers on different mummies have revealed “significant” amounts unexpected substances, cocaine among them. Cecil is understandably much more willing to disagree with the conclusion drawn about ancient trans-oceanic trade, but nowhere does he say the test results are nonsense. He simply states, quite correctly, that those who contend otherwise have not made nearly enough of a case to warrant mainstream consideration of their hypothesis. A couple of tests doesn’t stand up to hundreds of years of research.
Not enough tests to be sure of the results, you say? I completely agree. But in the absence of negative tests, it’s cocaine mummies = 2, nonsense = 0. And I think what tagos is saying is that it’s lamentable that very few scientists are willing to even attempt to investigate the anomaly any further, even if only to disprove it.
[QUOTE=sunfish]
Just to address this comment - if you think you’re dealing with something that would turn the world on its ear, the BEST thing to do is take your time and work put as much as you properly can before you publish. Nothing done well in science should be rushed./QUOTE]
But it worked out so well for Cold Fusion! I think you’re right, sunfish, but your post got me wondering if science has ever worked extremely well under a deadline…the only thing I came up with was the atom bomb. But even then, I guess still had decades of underpinning research.
Testy, I hear you. Unfortunately, science journalism isn’t immune to the lure of the sensational - or the tendency to let stuff that’s no longer interesting drop off the radar - any more than the mainstream media in this regard. There’s an added tendency among scientists not to make a big deal out of negative results, either, on the assumption that drawing attention to one’s “failures” isn’t all that healthy for funding and/or career prospects. There might be a mention somewhere in a conference presentation, or buried in the discussion of a later paper… but you’re right, the general public will often never hear about the follow-up.
Dominic Mulligan, I made that comment not based on what’s in figure 4, but the nature of the figure itself. Since the authors say the figure is a photomicrograph, that implies that they used an ordinary transmitted light microscope to look at their sample. In my experience with such microscopes, the higher you go in magnification, the more the depth of field becomes an issue in trying to bring individual three-dimensional particles into focus - i.e., it can be quite difficult to see a “uniform” in-focus surface across the total field of view. That’s because each particle has some slight variation in thickness from the others, and may be oriented differently within whatever medium you’re using to suspend them.
In looking at figure 4 as shown in the paper, you can see that some of the particles are in fact outside the depth of focus (they appear blurry), but the majority of the particles appear in focus in the same plane. At 1000x magnification, the depth of view is a mere 0.5 micrometers. If the sample was not prepared as thin section (fixed in epoxy and then ground down into a suitable thickness for a microscope slide), then either the particles are improbably thin (as little as 1/20 the maximum cited length of 10 micrometers) so as to appear in focus within that depth of view, or else the magnification is less than 1000x. The paper is absolutely silent on the subject of how this sample was prepped for viewing, and IMHO this is more sloppiness - yet another mark against the paper.
I really hadn’t intended to get into a laundry list of things I find incomplete, incorrect or inadequate about this paper. Suffice it to say that, had I received this manuscript as a reviewer, I would have recommended rejection, along with a heap of suggestions to the authors as to what they should do to whip the paper (and by extension, their research) into shape. Criticism is an integral part of the peer review process; it’s how scientists push each other to do better. My rejection of the hypothesis put forth in this paper does not mean I’m not open to new ideas; it means that SOMEBODY (if not the present authors) has got to do a much better job of making a case for extraterrestrial cells. I really hope that’s clear now.
Cold fusion, heh. Didn’t that little press conference blow up in their faces? 
Getting back to the comments made earlier, about scientists not giving a damn about “unconventional” hypotheses… There are, in all sincerity, probably thousands of projects in archaeology alone that would be truly neat to pursue, such as the question of cocaine mummies in Egypt. Archaeology is not my field, but I can make some very good guesses why the public winds up with this perception:
- Someone has done some follow-up work, and the sensational early reports turn out to have no basis, but: [ul]
[li]The media isn’t interested in a non-result. [/li][li]The scientist in question doesn’t want to highlight the fact that he/she “wasted” grant money on a non-result, because “waste” is not rewarded in the next funding cycle. (This is a serious issue in particular for young faculty who haven’t yet received tenure, and soft-money scientists that have to raise all of their salary AND research expenses through grants.)[/ul][/li] - Someone has tried to do some follow-up work, but: [ul]
[li]Competition for research funds is so tight that funding agencies will stick to funding “safe” projects most likely to produce results, based on previous work. (As a sidebar to this, in the US at least, funding agencies are acutely aware of the need to avoid funding projects that might be held up for ridicule by a non-interested public, because they don’t want to give Congress any excuse for cutting funds even more.)[/li][li]Politics (academic or nationalistic) make it difficult for qualified interested scientists to obtain their own samples.[/li][li]Museums and/or government agencies may have strict limitations on the number of destructive tests that can be conducted on a finite resource, so they refuse access.[/ul][/li] - The unconventional hypothesis is truly batshit insane and not worth pursuing, but you’d only know that if you already had a background in the field, or took the time to learn enough of the basics to at least get a grasp of the issue. The never-ending debate over evolution in the US is a perfect illustration of this sort of problem. Yes, scientists could probably do more to tackle such things, but there is a finite amount of time and energy that can be spent on them, and the truth of the matter is that research scientists get judged on their research results - not their educational efforts. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all, and do it well.
So the bottom line is that scientists in the field will probably have heard scuttlebutt sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, but the general public will likely never know the final outcome. The situation sucks for members of the public interested in science, I know. Best suggestion I can make is that you find a good library to try to keep up with the journals/magazines aimed at the interested layperson, and ALWAYS be most skeptical of stuff that gets more coverage in the mainstream press than it does elsewhere.
Update: I notice the Wikipedia article
says
and references an abstract at Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos .
That website is just some guy’s URL, so it’d be nice to find some more authoritative reference than that, but no dice so far.