NASA's cowardly responses to their #arseniclife FAIL

I've now seen two responses from NASA about the new publications that refute the Wolfe-Simon results.

The first was sent to Margaret Munro of Postmedia News, by James Schalkwyk of NASA:

We asked the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which had provided funding for the GFAJ-1 research, and he said we're deferring to the actual researchers for their statements on their research. You can contact Felisa Wolfe-Simon, (email address redacted) for their official statement (I assume you already know this though).

I'm sorry this isn't more helpful but it appears we haven't been involved in the research for some time. Good luck!

The second was just posted by Dan Vergano of USA Today on their ScienceFair blog.  It comes from Michael New, astrobiology discipline scientist in NASA's Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters:

NASA supports robust and continuous peer review of any scientific finding, especially discoveries with wide-ranging implications. It was expected that the 2010 Wolfe-Simon et al. Science paper would not be exempt from such standard scientific practices, and in fact, was anticipated to generate significant scientific attention given the surprising results in that paper. The two new papers published in Science on the micro-organism GFAJ-1 exemplify this process and provide important new insights. Though these new papers challenge some of the conclusions of the original paper, neither paper invalidates the 2010 observations of a remarkable micro-organism that can survive in a highly phosphate-poor and arsenic-rich environment toxic to many other micro-organisms. What has emerged from these three papers is an as yet incomplete picture of GFAJ-1 that clearly calls for additional research.

I'm at a loss for words.