[mechanical_fish]

We don't know of any form of life that isn't related to us at all. We have no strong evidence that such life has ever existed (although we have reasons to believe that it could have, before DNA-based life ate it all). For such life to exist on Earth today, it would have to compete with our relatives, and that's hard to do now, as it has been for billions of years.

So if nothing short of finding a completely unrelated living organism is going to excite you, the odds are strongly in favor of your being bored with biochemistry for as long as you live. Better change the channel.

All I know about biochem is what I learned by listening to Lander and Weinberg on MIT OpenCourseWare, but even I know that (a) every lifeform on earth has phosphorous-based chemicals at the center of its metabolic mechanism; (b) every lifeform on earth uses phosphate-based chemistry -- DNA or RNA, specifically -- as its genetic mechanism. These are the things you learn in the freshman class. Evidence that there might be an organism alive right now that violates one or both of these rules, even partially, is very exciting.

With our luck, they made some kind of mistake, and we can all go back to the status quo once they find the error, get totally drunk, and then issue an apology. But, if not, whole careers in biochemistry will be spent studying this.