A remarkable discovery appeared in the journal Science in 2010. Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues reported finding, in California’s salty Mono Lake, a bacterium that could substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its metabolism. This was stunning, as phosphorus was thought to be an essential constituent of many biological macromolecules, including proteins and DNA—the latter using phosphorus as part of its backbone. (The bacterium was, by the way, named GFAJ-1, standing for “Give Felisa a job,” as she was apparently looking for a permanent academic position.)
At any rate, this was huge news, and implied, to many, including hype-promoting journalists, that if life could thrive on arsenic, perhaps the chances of life on other planets was higher than we thought. Wolfe-Simon herself implied that perhaps there was a “shadow biosphere,” on Earth, including organisms that we didn’t know of because their biochemistry was so different from that of life we knew.
The publicity attending this discovery was huge: NASA held a press conference in which Simon was the only one of the dozen authors to appear. Simon also gave a TED talk on this subject, and in 2011 Time Magazine named her one of “Time’s 100 people,” supposedly the most influential group in the world.
The problem, which emerged pretty rapidly, is that this discovery was wrong. The research was sloppy, the reviewers apparently didn’t have the proper expertise to review the paper, and researchers who did have the expertise began pointing out the discovery’s flaws, first online and then in a series of eight critiques published in Science. As Wikipedia notes,
If correct, this would be the only known organism to be capable of replacing phosphorus in its DNA and other vital biochemical functions.[14][15][16] The Science publication and an hour-long December 2, 2010 NASA news conference were publicized and led to “wild speculations on the Web about extraterrestrial life”.[17] Wolfe-Simon was the only one of the paper’s authors at that news conference.[18] The news conference was promptly met with criticism by scientists and journalists.[19] In the following month, Wolfe-Simon (and her co-authors and NASA) responded to criticisms through an online FAQ and an exclusive interview with a Science reporter, but also announced they would not respond further outside scientific peer-review.[20][21] In April 2011 Time magazine named Wolfe-Simon one of that year’s Time 100 people.[22][23]
The Science article “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus” appeared in the June 3, 2011 print version of Science;[1] it had remained on the “Publication ahead of print” ScienceXpress page for six months after acceptance for publication. However, Rosemary Redfield and other researchers from the University of British Columbia and Princeton University performed studies in which they used a variety of different techniques to investigate the presence of arsenic in the DNA of GFAJ-1 and published their results in early 2012. The group found no detectable arsenic in the DNA of the bacterium. In addition, they found that arsenate did not help the strain grow when phosphate was limited, further suggesting that arsenate does not replace the role of phosphate.[24][25]
Following the publication of the articles challenging the conclusions of the original Science article first describing GFAJ-1, the website Retraction Watch argued that the original article should be retracted because of misrepresentation of critical data.[26][27] In October 2024, Science editor Holden Thorp notified the article’s authors of its intention to retract, arguing that, whereas formerly only misconduct justified retraction, current practice allows it for unreliablity.[22]
I wrote about the controversy at the time; see my several posts here. Simon et al. apparently were dead wrong. This was first revealed byblog posts by Rosie Redfield (who later published a critique in the literature) and followed by eight critiques in Science about the Wolfe-Simon et al, paper, and two failed attempts to replicate their results, both of which failed. Wolfe-Simon did not get her coveted job and, as the new NYT article below reports, she now spends her time making music on the oboe, and working part-time on bacteria that apparently can use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate.
Now the NYT has revisited the controversy on its 15th anniversary, and has published a long and remarkable article that does its best to exculpate Wolfe-Simon and demonize her critic. As the headline below implies, she further “changed science forever.” That’s wrong. Why do they do this? Greg Mayer has two theories, which are his, and I’ll mention them below.
Click below to read the NYT article by Sarah Scoles, which is also archived here.
The article is remarkably soft on Wolfe-Simon, downplaying the scientific sloppiness of her theme and making her into kind of heroine who was unfairly attacked by a social-media mob They don’t mention microbiologist Rosie Redfield, a prime critic responsible for pointing out the errors of Wolfe-Simon et al., though one link goes to her. The article implies, as I said, that “her discovery” (it was a group of people!) nevertheless changed science forever, for it was critiqued on social media (something that the NYT implies is bad), and from then on science has been vetted, even before papers are formally published, by non-scientists or scientists who publish their criticisms on social media, including blogs. This, claims author Scoles, has affected science so it’s never been the same.
Scoles is wrong and grossly exaggerates the situation. Papers were criticized on social media long before Wolfe-Simon’s, but hers received special attention solely because not only was it a remarkable phenomenon, one hard to believe, but also because the authors gave it huge hype, helped along by the press. Remarkable results deserve remarkable attention. And, in the end, the problems with the Wolfe-Simon paper and the failure to replicate it found their way into the scientific literature, so that nobody now believes that there was an arsenic-using bacterium. This is the way science is supposed to work, and in this case it did work. A sloppy and incorrect report was corrected.
Now others, including Science‘s editor Holden Thorp, as well as David Sanders in the Retraction Watch article below from 2020, feel that Wolfe-Simon et al. paper should be retracted. I disagree. Retraction, if it’s used for anything, should be reserved for papers that were duplicitous, containing fake data or false assertions. Wolfe-Simon et al. simply produced an incorrect and poorly reviewed paper, but there was no cheating. The paper should stay, and its simply met the fate of many papers that were wrong (remember, at least two Nobel Prizes have been given for sloppy and incorrect science). It is an object lesson on how wonky results get fixed.
Click below to read this Retraction Watch article from 2021, or see the more recent article here.
The question remains: why did the NYT paint a misleading picture of Felisa Wolfe-Simon, of her detractors, and of the scientific process? Why did they go so easy on her, making her into a heroine who was unfairly mobbed—to the point where she could not find an academic job. Greg Mayer suggested two theories:
1.) Greg notes that because the article “makes her out as a victim”, it plays into the “victim narrative” of scientists who were treated unfairly (she was a woman, too, which feeds into that narrative). And newspapers love victim narratives.
2.) Greg also wrote, “The article seems in line with the Times’s embrace of woo: another example of credulous reporting of outlandish claims, a la their recent UFO coverage.”
I’m going to let Greg dilate on these theories, which are his, below, so come back to this post later on today to see what he says. I agree with him in the main, and we both agree that Wolfe-Simon’s paper should NOT be retracted.
Addendum by Greg Mayer.
My first suggestion is actually the “scientist as hero” narrative, which portrays the lone scientist as struggling against an entrenched orthodoxy that tries to suppress their discoveries. For some discussion of the narrative, its faults, but also its upside, see this post by Andrew Gelman and the links within it. The media love this narrative– sometimes it’s even true! That the “hero scientist” becomes a “victim” is even better– now you’re Galileo! It doesn’t hurt if the victim seems to be opposed by heartless male editors like Holden Thorpe; it helps if you neglect to mention that some of the most incisive criticisms were by another female scientist. But as someone once said, you can’t wrap yourself in the cloak of Galileo merely because orthodoxy opposes you: you must also be right. Getting a sympathetic reassessment in the Times also fits well with the initial strategy of maximum media attention (NASA press conference, TED talk, Glamour, Time, Wall Street Journal, etc.) as a way to advance one’s career, and with the general approach to science of the media, including the Times.
The second suggestion, which is not mutually exclusive, is that the article follows the Times recent attraction to woo, like astrology and UFOs. A lot of elite media have gotten in on the latter– see Andrew Gelman again, especially here. He points out that the media seem to think they are being skeptical of elites and authority when purveying this stuff, but while doubting authority, they gullibly accept anything else they’re told. (There’s a very similar strain in RFK Jr.’s approach to science.) But, as Gelman notes, extreme skepticism bleeds into credulity.
I made a bad mistake years ago in a math paper. It never occurred to me that those who detected and pointed out my mistake were being mean to me.
I was blown away by this at the time. Largely due to Steve Benner – a prominent organic chemist – backing it up.
I was so meme/ DISAPPOINTED! /meme … and deep down felt like I was fooled, in a way.
Oh well. I have to say it’s a nifty theory! But yeah – it’s a hard lesson to learn – but also worth reviewing this quote :
“The first principle is you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Richard Feynman
1974 Caltech commencement address
… he’s saying, I think, scientists get excited – which is OK! But don’t lose your cool!
I most certainly did NOT “back up” the claim that GFAJ-1 had DNA with phosphate replaced by arsenate. At the press conference, with a steel chain and aluminum links, I explained why a chemist would not accept such a claim without extraordinary evidence, and not even then. I wrote one of the rebuttal papers in Science, and two years later, I published with Sara Seager and William Bains an analysis of why this “perfect storm” of error occurred. That included a comparison of how geologists (who reviewed this paper), physicists (who commented favorably on this paper), chemists (who understood the chemical constraints on arsenate esters) and biologists (who understand why arsenic is a poison), have different views of what constitutes an “extraordinary” result.
I am, of course, pleased-annoyed that Bryan would (a) think that I am an expert who should be listened to but (b) does not bother to listen to me. Perhaps this is a teachable moment.
That said, I agree that a retraction is not appropriate, and certainly not at the direction of an editor, especially absent fraud. Science is, above all else, an intellectual enterprise that lacks gatekeepers. Even if you are the editor of Science, you are not sufficiently informed, nor disinterested enough, to decide what and what not should be “retracted”. Error is an integral part of science. Indeed science can be thought of as an enterprise that manages error. But it must be self-correcting. Gatekeepers are many things, but they are certainly not “self-correcting”.
Benner, S.A. (2011) Comment on “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus”. Science 332, 1149-c PMID 21622712. doi: 10.1126/science.1201304
Benner, S.A., Bains, W., Seager, S. (2013) Models and standards of proof in cross-disciplinary science: The case of arsenic DNA. Astrobiology 13, 510-513. PMID: 23634974. doi: 10.1089/ast.2012.0954
Or go to 15 minutes of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvmPDljDXEU
Oh wow – sorry sorry, I was just crudely saying an off-the-cuff hazy recollection of that short press release – I was meaning to find it again to refresh my memory – your explanation of the theory was impressive I recall – i.e. very clear and insightful, no “fooling” in it. Thanks for this great review of the case!
Just a quick addendum:
If I could re-write my original comment, I’d swap “back up” for “provide background”. I think that’s what I meant.
Greg’s suggestions are certainly plausible.
No. The paper should not be retracted, even if its conclusions have been falsified. Pathways leading to false conclusions are useful in science, helping to keep others from going down blind alleys. Serious students of the topic will read the literature and will put it into proper context. The literature is full of conclusions that have been proved wrong or have been superseded. That’s OK. Retraction should be reserved to work that has been shown to be fraudulent.
A similar controversy in social psychology at the same time (2010) involved power posing: the idea that adopting an expansive stance could affecting circulating hormones, behaviour, and feelings of power and capability. Weak underpowered experiments with open-ended interpretation of results and lots of opportunities for p-hacking, followed by TED talks, social media criticism, complaints about media mobbing and unfiltered trash talk by critics who were mean to the researchers and hounded them out of science.
This blog post by Andrew Gelman has the whole sad story, emphasizing the role of senior mentors and journal editors in shielding the shoddy work from proper vetting (and in accusing social-media commentators of behaving badly).
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/
Complete with soft-focus victim narrative about the main power pose author that was published by the NYT several years later (as in the arsenic life story).
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/when-the-revolution-came-for-amy-cuddy.html
Ah, I remember the Amy Cuddy “scandal”. Wasn’t she partly vindicated? Science is always evolving and it’s good to track that.
Some replication studies showed that power posers had self-reported increased feelings of confidence. But the original paper (DOI:10.1177/0956797610383437) claimed that “High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk.” Replication studies tried to find the testosterone and cortisol effects and higher risk-taking but found none. The big one in 2015 was led by Eva Ranehill (DOI: 10.1177/0956797614553946).
Indeed Mike. The Power Pose thing was waaay overblown.
Like Time Magazine, TED talks started off pretty good.
After a few years however – perhaps after they increased in size enormously – with even small towns having their own “Teds” – it enshittified.
Now unwatchable mostly.
We have to get our heads around the fact that brands change over time: they often decay, sell out, enshitify themselves, and it can be hard to note as it is happening. Like the boiling frog.
Or Time, the BBC, and the NYTimes.
D.A.
NYC
True story. I taught the original paper in communication courses as a means to overcoming speech anxiety, including having students adopt the practice prior to presentations. Anecdotally, students self-reported on its effectiveness. When it later failed to replicate, I added the failed replication studies to readings nearer the end of the semester as a lesson on the provisional nature of scientific findings (and placebo effects). Some students still swore powerposing worked for them.
That’s awesome!!
Regarding the retraction by Science Magazine, and as you noted, the justification for a retraction is not met here. And in fact, the editor at the time, which was not Holden, bears responsibility for it being published in the first place by not properly ensuring it went through rigorous review. So the journal Science bears some of the blame.
Which gets to another point: in the cut-throat era of publishing “first”, it seems a number of papers in both Nature and Science end up having to be retracted for various reasons. One would think that such prestigious journals would do a better job of preventing these papers from being published in the first place.
I think back to 2005 when a paper was published in Science purporting to have found the mysterious flowering hormone, florigen. But then, no one could repeat that work and further investigation revealed data manipulation to come to a pre-determined conclusion (they said mRNA was the hormone). That paper was then retracted and the first author has disappeared from the field.
Then, two years later, two independently produced papers, on two different plant species, both found that the hormone was a small molecular weight protein that moved from the leaves to the apical meristem to induced flowering, and was not the mRNA). Now we had independent verification and confirmation.
We rarely, if ever, see retractions from regional journals or natural history journals, in part due to the nature of the work, but also because the reviewers are familiar with the subjects, and can spot poor quality work more easily. But in the more prominent journals, the papers get so complex and diverse that it can be difficult to find appropriate reviewers and have them properly evaluated.
Interesting paradox when considering which journals to trust the most.
“Now others, including Science‘s editor Holden Thorp, as well as David Sanders in the Retraction Watch article below from 2020, feel that Wolfe-Simon et al. paper should be retracted. I disagree. Retraction, if it’s used for anything, should be reserved for papers that were duplicitous, containing fake data or false assertions. Wolfe-Simon et al. simply produced an incorrect and poorly reviewed paper, but there was no cheating.”
I see the point about retraction being about issues with the results, observations or data.
I do think, particularly in the age of the internet and large public journal aggregators, that there should be some status or marker, even if it’s merely at authors request or discretion, for a paper whose conclusion is no longer accepted.
It’s far too easy for a lay person to stumble across some outdated or incorrect paper and short of doing a deep search through papers citing it for response papers, have no reasonable way to see that its conclusions are no longer accepted.
I agree, but often after a paper they will list all the critiques in the journal of that paper. That is one sign. But perhaps something more is needed. Though remember, a lot of papers whose results have not been verified, or which have been rebutted, are sitting in the literature without annotation.
Nature Communications has begun including reviews (and the authors’ responses) along with papers when they are published. I don’t know how far back this goes but it would allow greater transparency if more journals did this.
Another way to assess the reception of a paper is to look it up on Google Scholar and see who cited it, and what they had to say about it.
I think Google Scholar is a good tool for this. We wouldn’t want a small group of noisy censors deciding what is accepted and what is not. We’ve seen what happens in other fields when a small group gets cancel power.
In my capstone class, this story is still one of many examples that i use to show that progress in science can be pretty messy at times. This is used alongside other examples where a lot of media hype does NOT help things. Other examples of this sort are: cold fusion (“we might have rocket engines the size of a beer can!”), and the face on Mars (“signs of an ancient advanced civilization on Mars?”).
There was another extraordinary claim, where researchers thought they found collagen in dinosaur bones. Interestingly, that one does seem to be panning out, although the evidence behind the original claim did NOT warrant the hype that came out at the time.
As for why did the NYT paint a misleading picture? The answer is Click Bait. The need for accurate reporting does not always fair well against market forces where there is fierce competition for eyes on a screen.
Yep, it’s clickbait.
Here’s one from NYT about astrology.
https://archive.ph/Pbvze
That Wolfe-Simon paper was a travesty — and a slap in the face to anyone who has run a DNA gel. I followed it closely at the time, reading all the literature, the online critiques — but not making it to this blog site at the time. Maybe I’ll read those posts, too, but I get hot too easily. Strong stomach, you got, writing this stuff up. Will the madness end? Not likely.
That paper was essentially disingenuous — they showed some work with hi-tech elemental analysis, never did anything approximating the direct experiment, found friendly reviewers also clueless in the field, wrestled it into print. It was so bad, I thought it should be retracted even if every darn thing was a real figure — it never should hav been accepted. And her responses to the criticism were embarrassingly evasive and defensive. And, dare I say it, played the identity card as well – you should have seen her pompous YouTube videos and how it was written up by postmodern social scientists. Redfield took it on, and people said she was being mean to a woman in science and I’d better stop here.
And hey, by golly New York Times, deluded and woke as all-get-out, this one probably sits well with A. Chan’s piece.
I finished Helen Joyce’s fine, devoting book yesterday and have been in an uncertain, discouraged mood.
I wonder if someone is planning to make a ‘hero scientist’ film about the ‘discovery’ and so is chumming the press to attract attention?
I can’t access the NYT article. Are there comments from readers about the article that point out that “Scoles is wrong and grossly exaggerates the situation”? I’m wondering if other have picked up on this or if they’re blindly accepting the narrative.
The “social media is mean” narrative is also something that implicitly advertises conventional media such as the NYT as being better than social media, and also aligns with the “Elon / X is evil and mean” feeling that many Times readers have. There’s nothing better than reading something that confirms your feelings.
While I’m not on X very much, I do like the Community Notes feature; based on the comments regarding this article it sounds like it would be a helpful feature for the NYT to adopt. On the other hand, since it’s their own article, maybe that’s the reason they don’t.
Yes there are comments. Here’s the most upvoted one:
I am a chemist and remember when this whole story broke (hard to believe it’s been 15 years).
The thought that arsenic might play a phosphorus-like role in biochemistry has been around for a long time, as have analogous hypotheses that silicon might play a carbon-like role, or that selenium might play a sulfur-like role. (Check out a Periodic Table for a refresher… the one about selenium and sulfur is actually partly true)
The major concern about Wolfe-Simon’s work at the time was that the bond strengths and kinetics don’t work — organic arsenates are do not have the right stability to be substitutes for organic phosphates.
I think if she had gotten ahead of that objection, which would have been obvious to any biochemist, there would have been less pushback from the broader scientific community.
What really fuelled the fire in the science blogosphere of the early 2010s was the seeming lack of awareness of this basic objection, the concerns about sloppy methodology mentioned in this article, and the flashy publicity surrounding it all. To scientists, it looked like a basic failure of the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” test, mixed with a whole lot of hype.
It’s very sad to hear that she was personally targeted. But the fact that the “arsenic life” proposal hasn’t really advanced much in the intervening 15 years, despite so many new physical biochemistry techniques, does not bode well for the original hypothesis.
https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/457gqv?rsrc=cshare&smid=url-share
Re playing the Galileo card, here’s a somewhat relevant quote from Carl Sagan:
Everyone dreams of being Stanley Prusiner. In the movie Contagion, the Jennifer Ehle character, having given herself the untested vaccine, visits her infected father in the hospital and reminds him about how he taught her about Barry Marshall. We can never get enough of the unacknowledged genius.
Wolfe-Simon has failed one of the fundamendal criteria for being a scientist. She fell so deeply in love with her hypothesis that, 15 years later, she still can’t see all the flaws in her experiments, nor all the a priori reasons that it must be wrong.
If she’d been able to recognize her errors, the scientific community would have happily given her another chance.
Disgraceful that the NYT couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge you by name, Rosie.
To me, the name she gave to the bacterium is a red flag about her personality.
I’m not unsympathetic to lab jokes that accidentally go public…
I did a long phone interview with the author, Sarah Scoles, but apparently my perspective didn’t overlap with the one she wanted for her story.
Comment by Greg Mayer
That’s nice to know, Rosie: Scoles knew what had happened, but declined to put it in her story.
GCM
All the links in one place (yes, there’s a lot if link rot but wayback machine should find them): https://blog.coturnix.org/2011/09/30/arseniclife-link-collection/
As soon as I read:
” In April 2011 Time magazine named…”
I know there’s a hunk of garbage to come. In any domain. Why do people take that once great magazine seriously at all? Celebrity listicles and advertisements for hemorrhoid cream. At the doctor’s I read “Golf Magazine” and I don’t even play golf!
It is good there’s mechanisms to catch these mistakes and/or scams that idiots like Time fall for always.
That’s how it is done. Like Data Colada.
D.A.
NYC