‘Arsenic Life’ Microbe Study Retracted after 15 Years of Controversy
A controversial arsenic microbe study unveiled 15 years ago has been retracted. The study’s authors are crying foul
Felisa Wolfe-Simon speaks during a news conference at NASA Headquarters on December 2, 2010 in Washington, DC.
“Can you imagine eating toxic waste for breakfast?” Science magazine asked in a 2010 press release touting a newly discovered microbe controversially claimed to “live and grow entirely off arsenic.”
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’s Mono Lake, a research team had found evidence of a bacterium swapping out phosphorus for arsenic. If true, the result would’ve 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’t convinced.
Now, some 15 years later, the venerable scientific journal has retracted this “arsenic life” 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.
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“Science has decided that this Research Article meets the criteria for retraction by today’s standards,” said the journal’s editor-in-chief Holden Thorp in the July 24 retraction notice. While Science’s 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’s experiments don’t 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’t rely on it for its metabolism or…
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