Fair enough, I was too negative. I'll leave my comment unedited, so people won't get confused about the exchange. The article itself is ok, and the researchers

Fair enough, I was too negative. I'll leave my comment unedited, so people won't get confused about the exchange. The article itself is ok, and the researchers had good intentions. The problem is the idea took a life of its own. It almost became a meme. I heard this article many times quoted on HN. And the idea itself is definitely wrong, and needs to be debunked. If the 521-year half-life were remotely true, we couldn't hope to ever sequence something older than 100 or 1000 half lives (i.e. half a million years). Well, we did that just the year after (this article was published in 2012, we sequenced a 500k year old fossil in 2013) We also sequenced a one million year fossil in 2021 [1]) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00436-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00436-x