As a recent inspection at the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist demonstrated, and other sources confirm, material and documents are still being moved around in farcical shell games.
If Dr Lipton is correct, the race has now begun to see whether the first artificial scientist to win a Nobel prize is based on silicon or biological material.
"Panguite is an especially exciting discovery since it is not only a new mineral, but also a material previously unknown to science, " study researcher Chi Ma, a senior scientist at Caltech, said in a statement.