Don't get me wrong. Nobody laughs at him or his team in conferences. When they team present, there are intelligent and incisive questions. Or sometimes there is just silence - not because there are no questions, but because the questions would be of the form "why are you still flogging this dead horse?".

It's possible for someone to resurrect their reputation, IF they follow a sensible path. The issue with these microbe papers is that although they superficially appear to be following a scientific path, at heart they are not. They are grasping at straws to try and preserve the original finding of biological association.

Other papers by other workers have shown, for example, that chemical recrystallisation, especially in impact-shocked materials can produce exactly the same crystal shapes that are repeatedly claimed to be exclusively biological.

Without another line of evidence, the science community will never conclusively prove nor disprove the issue and we must fall back on Ocham's razor and on Sagan's dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

I personally am quite open to the possibility of past or even present subsurface life on mars, but I think we need to find other ways to address the issue.