When reporting a story like this, it only makes sense to consult with a wide range of experts to get their feel for it. Science is not a democracy, but when a lot of people well-versed in a subject all point to the same problems with a study, their observations are newsworthy. Such was my experience in reporting for Slate on the reactions from the scientific community to claims of arsenic-based life earlier this month. In that case, the responses were generally negative (actually, ranging from wishing it were true to wondering how the paper even got published). But the responses were not uniform, so I ended up reprinting a bunch of them here on the Loom.

In