... "The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it." ...

Originally posted by Blarneystoner
Looking a little deeper here I realized that it's an international team of scientists that published the findings and not Joe Miller alone. I suppose you missed that as well.

With regards to "life as we know it"; It's probably safe to assume that all life utilizes some form of respiration. The Labeled Release experiment tested for evidence of respiration and returned positive results twice. While the other experiements did not find evidence of organic molecules.

I don't understand why Illustronic is going on about organic molecules and perchlorate because they were never put forth as being evidence of life on Mars. Perchlorate was found by the Phoenix but that's not what we're talking about here.

What we ARE talking about is evidence of metabolism. The published work seems to show that the off gassing detected by Viking is associated with bilogical respiration and not the result of geologic activity.