The report by the state-run Xinhua news agency echoed a growing mood of nationalism in China and comes amid official fears the United States is trying to contain China and after a string of disputes that have battered Sino-U.S. ties.
"Now more and more scientists across the world have begun to doubt the sensational scientific discoveries made over the past few years in the U.S.," Xinhua said.
"Fake research findings by two American scientists in discovering 'cold fusion' was laid bare a few years ago," it said referring to a 1989 experiment that could not be duplicated and lost scientific credibility.
It quoted scientists attending the 30th International Geology Congress in Beijing as casting doubt on findings from a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite from Mars unearthed in the Antarctic that showed evidence of ancient, microscopic fossils and which fell to earth 13,000 years ago.
"Geologists from all over the world today expressed doubt about the claim by U.S. scientists that they have discovered evidence of life on Mars from remains of a meteorite that plunged to earth," Xinhua said.
"It sounds like a fantastic story," Xinhua quoted Professor Umberto Gordani, president of Brazil's Sao Paulo University and a renowned scientist in the study of early-stage rocks, as saying.
However, a Chinese professor said the hypothesis was not impossible.
"It is not absolutely impossible that primitive life existed on Mars some three billion years ago," Xinhua quoted Zhang Yun, professor of the biology department of Beijing University, as saying.
"The crux of the matter lies in how to determine that the stains of life substance on the meteorite come from Mars, and are not pollution from life on the earth after the meteorite plunged to the earth," he said.
Scientists at the congress said any organic life on the surface of a meteorite was usually burned off as it passed through the atmospheric layer to earth.
If evidence of life existed within the meteorite, it would be impossible for it to remain intact, Xinhua quoted them as saying.
Original file name: CNI - China.Doubts Mars Life
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