Really Big News

It’s life Jim, but not as we know it.  No, not silicon based life forms, but something equally weird.  Phosphorus is one of those elements essential to life in the form of Adenosine Triphosphate, which helps with energy storage and usage in every living cell on the planet.  Without it no cell can process energy and live.  Now we have a bacteria discovered which can use Phosphorus and another heavier element right under it on the periodic table.  Arsenic.  That’s right – poison to the rest of us is life-giving to this organism.  Arsenic and Phosphorus are capable of forming similar bond structures so as a chemist I can see how it would work in this discovery, but the atomic radii are really different, and if you’re going to start cramming Arsenic into your biochemical structure you have to change a whole bunch of other things.  The fact that an organism, even as lowly as a bacterium, has done it and lives with this change means something really big.

Life can, and will, evolve in other environments that would kill us.  Just when we think we understand everything we realize how much we really don’t know.  To borrow a line from Jurassic Park:  Life will find a way.