October 25, 2007

Sometimes it can take a half-century to realize you’ve made a mistake. Homer Jacobson, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, learned that lesson when he decided to Google himself and found that incorrect statements he made in 1955 had come back to haunt him.

To make amends, Mr. Jacobson retracted two statements from an article published in American Scientist magazine more than five decades ago. In a letter in the magazine’s November-December issue, Mr. Jacobson said he had made incorrect assessments of how improbable it would have been for processes on the early earth to bring about the first organisms.

Mr. Jacobson said that it is not normal to retract such old errors but that he was motivated because creationists were now quoting his article to support their cause. “I am deeply embarrassed to have been the originator of such misstatements, allowing bad science to have come into the purview of those who use it for anti-science ends,” he said.

Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist, applauded Mr. Jacobson in an editorial in the same issue. “Jacobson responded in the noblest tradition of science,” she wrote. The episode is described in today’s New York Times.

In his original article, Mr. Jacobson asserted that it was “utterly improbable, in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life,” for the environment to create a single amino-acid molecule. He now says that statement was based on a calculation assuming there was no external source of energy involved in forming amino acids.

But in 1953, only two years before Mr. Jacobson wrote those words, a young chemist named Stanley L. Miller and the Nobel laureate Harold C. Urey had published a paper in the journal Science showing how lightning could have caused simple molecules to form amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.

Now Mr. Jacobson notes that electrical discharges, such as lightning, and other forms of energy on the early earth could have provided the energy to produce amino acids. His earlier statement “is completely inapplicable,” he said in the letter. —Richard Monastersky