The Old Ones. Or not.

The Scientific American has an article about long-lived microbes inside the Earth. Tuning the metabolism down to nearly nothing, a surprising quantity of living things can survive where you wouldn't expect there to be enough food. Nothing big, mind you--just microbes.

One bit that surprised me was about Lipman

Back in the late 1920s, a scientist named Charles Lipman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, began to suspect there were bacteria in rocks. Not fossil bacteria. Alive bacteria.

When placed in solutions of coal dust and sterile water, in two to three weeks he began to see what looked like bacteria.

...

Intriguingly, he found that a rehydration period of at least a few days in liquid was essential for revivification. If the crushed coal was wetted but immediately placed on food-infused gelatin-like agar in a Petri dish, nothing grew.

...

In fact, he found that heating the sample for hours at 160°C never managed to kill the bacteria inside the coal. If anything, it only seemed to encourage them. The longer they were baked – up to an incredible 50 hours – the better they seemed to grow when the coal was subsequently crushed (If his results were genuine, they may not be altogether surprising given both the conditions that create coal and the effects of heat shock proteins).

That's a pretty dramatic result, and I'd expect lots of people would check it out. But a quick googling doesn't show that anybody has reproduced his results. On the contrary:

S.K. Roy, 1937 Popular Astronomy 45:499.

Charles Lipman claimed to have found living bacteria in stony meteorites. Roy doubts this, pointing out Lipman had also "found" living bacteria in ancient terrestrial rocks and coal, but that other scientists had failed to verify this. Roy also tried to obtain living cultures from meteorites, but failed.

Did the experiments that "failed to verify this" ever get published? If not, why not? Popular Astronomy vol45 doesn't seem to be available online. I will have to see if the Astronomy library has a copy. Maybe it will have references.

The failure to reproduce ought to be as famous as the claim.