Arguing about Antarctica

 Hype about unclassified life found in sub-glacial Lake Vostok has led to an almighty squabble between scientists. Could peer review be the antidote to the argument?

  “We’ve found something new!”

“Oh, no you haven’t…”

“Oh, yes we have!”

The scientific pursuit is seldom presented as pantomime, but it’s no secret that scientists don’t always agree with each other. Rarely has this comparison been so apt than in the debate about Lake Vostok – the largest subglacial lake yet discovered in Antarctica which may (or may not) be home to never-before-discovered microbial life. Different researchers are currently making totally contradictory claims about bacteria found in the samples from the lake. Who will turn out to be correct is currently anyone’s guess…

This is an intriguing tale of a lost water world, trapped under ice for maybe 25 million years. A world where sunlight cannot penetrate, where oxygen levels are intolerably high and where pressures stretch to over 300 times that of the surface. Anything that could survive in these extreme and hostile conditions would have had to evolve unique survival adaptations to endure the cold, dark waters. And it’s for exactly that reason that for the last 60 years, teams of scientists have been determined to discover if extremophilic unknown life does lie beneath. 

I’ve been following the story of Lake Vostok with great interest since February last year when the team were finally able to drill down into the lake and acquire water samples, marking a sensational day for science. In October, results of the first samples of surface water disappointingly revealed no life and we had to wait with baited breath for the analysis of further samples taken from deeper waters.

Excitingly last month, news broke that the team of researchers studying the samples had identified seven species of bacteria that didn’t correspond to any known bacteria. The Associated Press reported that “a new form of microbial life has been found” in the lake and that “the unidentified and unclassified bacterium has no relation to any of the existing bacterial types.”

Unfortunately, like many over-hyped pronouncements, this turned out to be a little premature…

Later that week, Vladimir Korolev, the head of St Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute – the lab analysing the samples - put an end to this excitement, cautioning that a new type of bacteria had probably not been discovered, and it was likely just contamination from kerosene used in the drilling fluid to prevent the water hole from freezing over that had produced these misleading results.

"We found certain specimens, although not many. All of them were contaminants," Korolev said in a quote, thoroughly killing everyone’s buzz.

“They really need to stop playing around with frozen lake water bathed in kerosene and get a clean bulk water sample,” quipped a rival researcher.

So far, so disappointing… But then, a few days later, determined not to be undermined, the original researchers refuted Korolev’s claim, insisting that they had found new life in the lake and that they had taken steps to rule out potential contamination.

“We are very sure that what we have found is an unclassified native microbe,” lead researcher Sergery Bulat told Nature. “It seems to belong to a division of uncultured environmental bacteria that haven’t been determined yet.”

It sounds like everyone’s more than a little confused.  It makes me think that this scientific squabble is actually a good argument for the peer review system.

Last month I wrote a feature detailing some of the problems with the time-consuming process that scientific papers are subjected to before they can be published in journals, but this case suggests peer review does have a fundamental place in the pursuit of truth. Press releases are difficult to trust if the information hasn’t yet gone through this process, so you can essentially say whatever you like in them, potentially misleading the public. It’s easy to understand why science might be over-hyped when marketing is king in our modern world and researchers rely on public money for funding. But as this situation reveals, making scientific pronouncements which are basically pure speculation prior to peer review can be problematic.

The story of life’s potential in Lake Vostok is not over yet. Fresh water samples will arrive in May to be analysed, which will perhaps clear this matter up. But it’s apparent that we will have to be a little more patient in order to find out once and for all if unknown life exists in the lake that time forgot.