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\u2018Arsenic Life\u2019 Microbe Study Retracted after 15 Years of Controversy<\/p>\n
A controversial arsenic microbe study unveiled 15 years ago has been retracted. The study\u2019s authors are crying foul<\/p>\n
By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings<\/span><\/p>\n Felisa Wolfe-Simon speaks during a news conference at NASA Headquarters on December 2, 2010 in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n \u201cCan you imagine eating toxic waste for breakfast?\u201d Science magazine asked in a 2010 press release touting a newly discovered microbe controversially claimed to \u201clive and grow entirely off arsenic.\u201d<\/p>\n The claim was controversial because it flew in the face of well-established biochemistry. Of the many elements thought crucial for life, one of the most important is phosphorus, which serves as a building block for DNA and other biomolecules. But in samples from California\u2019s Mono Lake, a research team had found evidence of a bacterium swapping out phosphorus for arsenic. If true, the result would\u2019ve rewritten textbooks and led to radical revisions in our understanding of where and how life might crop up elsewhere in the cosmos. The trouble was: many experts weren\u2019t convinced.<\/p>\n Now, some 15 years later, the venerable scientific journal has retracted this \u201carsenic life\u201d study, once the star of a NASA news conference because of its epochal astrobiological implications. First elevating an early-career U.S. Geological Survey researcher, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, to acclaim, then to controversy, the study convulsed the scientific community for two years, raising questions over how science is both conducted and publicized.<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n \u201cScience has decided that this Research Article meets the criteria for retraction by today\u2019s standards,\u201d said the journal\u2019s editor-in-chief Holden Thorp in the July 24 retraction notice. While Science\u2019s earlier standards only allowed for the retraction of a study because of fraud or misconduct, he explained, the journal now allows for removal if a paper\u2019s experiments don\u2019t support its key conclusions. He pointed to two 2012 studies, also published by Science, that suggested the Mono Lake microbe, dubbed GFAJ-1, merely sequestered arsenic extraordinarily well internally and didn\u2019t rely on it for its metabolism or reproduction. \u201cGiven the evidence that the results were based on contamination, Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data,\u201d states a follow-up blog post co-authored by Thorp and Valda Vinson, executive editor for the Science journals. Ten Science studies have been retracted for unintended error since 2019, according to a spokesperson for the journal.<\/p>\n The study\u2019s authors, including Wolfe-Simon, protested the retraction in a letter to Science. \u201cClaims should be made, tested, challenged, and ultimately judged on the scientific merits by the scientific community itself,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n One of the study\u2019s authors, geochemist Ariel Anbar of Arizona State University, calls the retraction explanation \u201cunbelievably misleading,\u201d saying the evidence for contamination in the original study was weak and should be adjudicated by scientists, not the journal. \u201cYou would think that if Science wanted to retract this paper after nearly 15 years, they would be able to come up with a clear, convincing argument for the published record\u2014developed transparently and presented coherently. You would be wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n A NASA official has also asked Science to reconsider the retraction, saying the journal has \u201csingled out\u201d the study and that the decision upends scientific standards.<\/p>\n In some respects, the arsenic life saga is less about the disputed result itself and more about the zeitgeist in which it emerged. The study debuted at a seminal moment when the stately and slow tradition of scientific peer review was speeding up and moving online, opening up to the wider scientific community and closely coupling with the 24\/7 churn of social media and digital news. With the benefit of hindsight, the ensuing furor was if nothing else a warning about \u201cbig, if true\u201d research results rapidly rolled out to breathless fanfare\u2014in this case the now notorious NASA news conference. Wolfe-Simon, then a 33-year-old NASA astrobiology fellow, became a scientific celebrity practically overnight\u2014and also a lightning rod for controversy.<\/p>\n The research team\u2019s decision to engage minimally with online criticism while handling disagreements in the more formal, slow-moving world of scientific journals played badly in the burgeoning blogosphere era, with effects that linger clearly today. \u201cOver the years, Science has continued to receive media inquiries about the Wolfe-Simon Research Article, highlighting the extent to which the paper is still part of scientific discussions,\u201d Thorp noted in the retraction statement.<\/p>\n In February questions of retracting the study were apparently revived by a New York Times profile of Wolfe-Simon that portrayed her and the search for arsenic life in sympathetic terms. Amid the profile\u2019s publication, Anbar says, he and other study authors received queries about a retraction from the journal, followed by a notification of its decision to proceed with a plan to retract (against the authors\u2019 stated disagreement). The authors eventually okayed a draft of the retraction that made it clear that there was no misconduct, but the stated basis for retraction was still vague, Anbar says.<\/p>\n \u201cMy conclusion is that, yes, the paper should be retracted so that a statement of caution appears whenever it is accessed,\u201d says Patricia Foster, an emerita professor of biology and research ethicist at Indiana University, noting that it was still generating fresh citations in peer-reviewed science papers. But, she adds, it\u2019s important that the retraction notice makes clear that no research misconduct is suspected about the work.<\/p>\n Leonid Kruglyak of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, a co-author of one of the 2012 papers that found that GFAJ-1 merely sequestered arsenic, also agrees with Science\u2019s retraction. It is now appropriate based on the new standards for retracting papers with seriously flawed conclusions such as the GFAJ-1 study, he says. \u201cI don\u2019t think this is really a dispute, except on the part of the authors themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n One critic of the retraction, however, is chemist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, who sat on the 2010 NASA news conference as a skeptical voice. Science, he says, shouldn\u2019t act as a \u201cgatekeeper\u201d by retracting a study that might be wrong but wasn\u2019t fraudulent; doing so carries its own threat to open scientific research, in his view. \u201cThe paper should stay, and it has simply met the fate of many papers that were wrong,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s an object lesson on how wonky results get fixed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018Arsenic Life\u2019 Microbe Study Retracted after 15 Years of Controversy A controversial arsenic microbe study unveiled 15 years ago has been retracted. The study\u2019s authors are crying foul By Dan Vergano edited by Lee Billings Felisa Wolfe-Simon speaks during a news conference at NASA Headquarters on December 2, 2010 in Washington, DC. \u201cCan you imagine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12171,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[5740,2572,337,3252,5741,188,637],"class_list":{"0":"post-12170","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-arsenic","9":"tag-controversy","10":"tag-life","11":"tag-microbe","12":"tag-retracted","13":"tag-study","14":"tag-years"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}On supporting science journalism<\/h2>\n