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At a recent American Chemical Society Meeting in Boston last month, an ongoing disagreement over a particular tool for detecting and visualizing RNA in living cells, called SmartFlares, reached a fever pitch. At one point, Chad Mirkin, a chemist at Northwestern University who helped develop the technique, called outspoken critic Raphael Levy, a biochemist at the University of Liverpool, a “scientific terrorist.”
“It’s certainly not the sort of culture and atmosphere that is conducive to debate and to addressing these very important issues,” Levy tells The Scientist. Mirkin did not comment on the incident.
The debate over SmartFlares has been going on for years. The tool, which had been made commercially available by MilliporeSigma in 2013, detects RNA in live cells.
There are over 40 papers reporting the successful use of such structures.
The idea behind SmartFlares is straightforward: The probes enter cells via endocytosis, each ...
