NASA, JIM YUNGELBiologists studying ice core samples near the surface of Antarctica’s Lake Vostok—considered by many to be one of the world’s harshest environments—recently reported finding microbial evidence that points to the presence of mollusks, crustaceans, annelid worms, and fish. The extraordinary findings have proven too extraordinary for some researchers, who have publicly criticized the work in the days since it was published online last Wednesday (July 3) in PLOS ONE.
Sergey Bulat, a Lake Vostok expert at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Gatchina, Russia, told Nature that the samples analyzed by Scott Rogers, a biologist at Bowling Green State University, and his team are likely heavily contaminated with microbes from the outside the lake.
“Their analysis is very questionable,” Bulat, whose discovery of bacteria in Lake Vostok in March has also been criticized for possible contamination, told Nature. “It appears to me they have neither run proper controls nor looked at contamination databases to subtract from their results the respective levels of microbial contamination you would expect.”
Writing in their PLOS ONE paper, Rogers’ team acknowledged the possibility of some contamination. But they contend that it is unlikely that the sheer volume of microbes ...
