With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon started talking at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 2, 2010.
“I’ve found — I’ve led a staff that has found — one thing that I’ve been excited about for a few years,” Dr. Wolfe-Simon mentioned. She was at the moment a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, talking to a large viewers of journalists and bloggers, two of them carrying tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers on-line.
Days earlier than, NASA had teased “an astrobiology discovering that can affect the seek for proof of extraterrestrial life.” Hypothesis that NASA had found some type of alien life bred exponentially throughout nascent social media platforms.
Dr. Wolfe-Simon had, sadly, not discovered aliens, nor had she ever mentioned she did. However she had discovered a terrestrial organism that was behaving not like any life kind identified on Earth.
The creature got here from the mud of Mono Lake, a physique of water close to Yosemite Nationwide Park that’s almost thrice as salty because the Pacific Ocean. The lake has the pH stage of glass cleaner and, most significantly for her staff’s discovery, is filled with poisonous arsenic.
All identified dwelling issues use six main chemical components to maintain their our bodies churning. One is phosphorus. However from Mono Lake, Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s staff mentioned that they had remoted an organism that might change phosphorus with arsenic.
“I’d wish to introduce to you immediately the bacterium GFAJ-1,” she proclaimed. An image of magnified black and white cylinders appeared on the display screen.
“We’ve cracked open the door to what’s attainable for all times elsewhere within the universe,” Dr. Wolfe-Simon mentioned. “And that’s profound.”
“It sounds to me such as you’re going to want to exit and discover a new textbook to show all these college students about what components are used to construct life,” mentioned one other panelist, Mary Voytek, director of NASA’s astrobiology program, a funder of the invention.
“I don’t learn about a complete new textbook,” mentioned James Elser, a professor at Arizona State College, additionally on the panel. “However definitely some paragraphs and sentences are going to must be rewritten.”
Dr. Wolfe-Simon piped in.
“Give me a while, Jim,” she mentioned. “I’m originally of my profession.”
Dr. Wolfe-Simon didn’t change basic biology, however her announcement pointed to a change in how science can be performed. Researchers trekked down from the ivory tower to have disputes and discussions within the digital open on blogs and in social media. Data flowed beneath the hashtag #arseniclife, shaking up conventional strategies of evaluating fact and rigor in analysis.
The saga highlighted the web’s prospects for open discourse and real-time peer evaluation. Nevertheless it additionally revealed the perils of the medium, as Dr. Wolfe-Simon confronted sustained private assaults. She hasn’t actually been a part of scientific society since.
Throughout these ensuing years, critics have persistently known as for her paper’s retraction. And now, greater than a decade later, that retraction is being pursued by the outstanding journal that printed her staff’s work. They proceed to defend the work’s integrity.
On the identical time, Dr. Wolfe-Simon is resurfacing with new experiments that ask basic questions on how, precisely, life works — and if the solutions are totally different from what’s in immediately’s textbooks.
Dr. Wolfe-Simon had been pondering for years about life which may substitute arsenic for phosphorus earlier than she went out seeking it. In 2009, amongst limestone turrets and buzzing flies, she plunged clear plastic tubes into Mono’s mud, gathering samples.
She finally remoted GFAJ-1, which her 11 co-authors agreed might incorporate arsenic into the molecules that make up its biology — proteins, fat and nucleic acids, which embrace DNA.
She and her staff submitted their paper to Science, the journal that has printed such main discoveries as a sequence of the human genome and proof of ancient water on Mars.
Editors then despatched the manuscript out for peer evaluation, through which outdoors specialists consider and poke holes in a paper. The evaluation that got here again was constructive, enthusiastic, because the science journalist Dan Vergano reported in USA Today after he obtained the data from NASA beneath a Freedom of Data Act request.
NASA was additionally enthusiastic.
“Again then, we used to have one thing known as a homicide board,” mentioned Dr. Voytek, the place individuals assessed the rigor of unpublished scientific outcomes.
On the #arseniclife homicide board, the staff determined to maneuver ahead, regardless that they have been conscious of some fuzziness within the outcomes. “We understood that this wasn’t conclusive,” Dr. Voytek mentioned. “We understood it was suggestive.” They thought the uncertainty would possibly encourage future investigation.
Quickly after got here NASA’s ET information launch and the flashy information convention.
Holden Thorp, the present editor in chief of Science mentioned the journal’s editors weren’t conscious of NASA’s framing. “The usage of the phrase ‘extraterrestrial’ was not one thing we picked up till it had already gotten away from us,” he mentioned.
And get away it did.
The hype across the paper quickly made Dr. Wolfe-Simon, as we are saying immediately, the web’s important character. After the announcement, she delivered a TED Talk, sat for an interview with the journal Glamour and was one of many Time100.
For a few days after the information convention, the response was constructive. However then blogs run by scientific researchers known as consideration to methodological considerations with the work and introduced doubt to the conclusions.
There was an excessive amount of contaminating phosphorus within the samples, some mentioned. Different critiques famous that when the staff put the bacterium’s DNA in water, the arsenic they mentioned was current ought to, chemically, have fallen apart.
Previously, such critiques would have appeared in journal papers printed months later. Usually, says Gunver Lystbaek Vestergaard, a science journalist who studied the #arseniclife saga as a visiting scholar at Cornell College, the frank discussions resulting in these articles would have occurred behind closed doorways.
With #arseniclife, they propagated by way of blogs and Twitter, outpacing the standard velocity of science. The general public watched science play out as a course of, full with arguments and conflicting interpretations, relatively than current as a set of settled info.
Anybody might see scientists, from their private accounts, questioning the standard of analysis printed in one of many world’s most esteemed journals. The occasions pulled energy from the scientific clergy and put it within the arms of congregants.
They usually have been being taken significantly. One critic who poked holes within the discovering on her weblog later printed a peer-reviewed response in Science.
“We’ve by no means seen something prefer it,” mentioned Dr. Vestergaard, who studied #arseniclife for her forthcoming e book “Our Residing Universe.”
Quickly, outstanding science journalists picked up on the controversy. Information protection shifted, highlighting the critiques of #arseniclife, and of Dr. Wolfe-Simon. Some science journalists did critical reporting on the controversy, however much less rigorous write-ups adopted. “There’s a variety of simply copy-pasting and referencing one another’s work with out doing any impartial analysis,” Dr. Vestergaard mentioned.
“The entire media body simply modified over a day or two,” Dr. Vestergaard added.
This upending of scientific analysis hasn’t translated to large-scale adjustments in formal peer evaluation, but it surely does endure on-line: For example, within the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists cached papers on-line and let the gang do peer reviewing.
That had cons — high-profile however incorrect outcomes making headlines — and execs, like merging basic and scientific audiences. The general public obtained “entry to analysis materials of immense topical curiosity,” in response to an evaluation in The Lancet.
However the conventional, personal course of had lengthy made scientists really feel secure, giving them a capability to form narratives about rising science. As soon as it was gone, so was the neat boundary. “The formal communication traces in science misplaced management,” mentioned Linda Billings, a communications marketing consultant who labored with NASA on the 2010 announcement. “And I don’t suppose they’ve correctly regained that management.”
Some specialists say this was in all probability a great change: If public establishments — or scientists doing the work — might absolutely management a narrative, science might turn out to be propaganda. Journalists, different scientists and the general public, they are saying, ought to have the ability to ingest and interpret outcomes independently.
However the #arseniclife staff wasn’t able to embrace that openness at the moment. Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s adviser and co-author, Ron Oremland of the USA Geological Survey, informed the group to reply to critiques in peer-reviewed journals, shutting down what many noticed as productive, open debate.
“This was not an efficient technique on this case given the ‘viral’ nature of the response,” mentioned Thomas Kulp, one other of the examine’s authors and an Earth science professor at Binghamton College.
The quiet didn’t sit properly within the blogosphere, nor did Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s temporary second of scientific celeb.
Critique quickly turned assault, and assault usually turned private — focusing, for example, on Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s look, together with her dyed hair.
“It was this wave that occurred each week,” she mentioned of the adverse publicity that resulted.
“It was simply terrible,” she recalled. “It was actually, actually terrible.”
Dr. Thorp, who wasn’t editor in chief of Science on the time, mentioned not sufficient had been achieved to defend Dr. Wolfe-Simon in opposition to on-line vitriol.
“I feel there’s in all probability extra that Science might have achieved, by talking out in opposition to that and by additionally transferring extra rapidly and with better transparency,” he mentioned. Bruce Alberts, who led Science from 2008 to 2013, declined to remark.
Though there have been advantages to the open dialogue, Ariel Anbar, a professor on the Faculty of Earth and Area Exploration at Arizona State College and an writer on the paper, mentioned the end result of the #arseniclife debate had additionally revealed the Web’s drawbacks.
“It’s a tradition that strikes quick however breaks individuals,” he mentioned.
Dr. Wolfe-Simon left Dr. Oremland’s lab quickly after the paper was printed. She briefly discovered a brand new base at Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory.
It was troublesome that her co-workers knew her from the web. And shortly, Dr. Wolfe-Simon mentioned, she couldn’t get grants or publish papers; she couldn’t alter to the poisonous waters. “I turned radioactive,” she mentioned.
And so, after her time as important character was over, Dr. Wolfe-Simon pivoted: Skilled as an oboist, she began a music efficiency grasp’s diploma in 2013 whereas pregnant with the primary of her two youngsters.
Music has been her steadying bass all through her exile. She performs professionally and teaches part-time. Her basement, full of sheet music, held a visitor room for visiting musicians, a music studio and a station devoted to handmaking oboe reeds, a woody assortment tagged and arranged simply as lab tools can be.
She took jobs like organizing science seminars for Mills School in Oakland, serving to biotech startups and dealing in bakeries. She referred to that as “industrial microbiology.”
“Once you do guide labor, individuals are much less doubtless to have a look at you on the web,” she mentioned.
Often, skilled penalties so extreme are reserved for individuals who fabricate information or commit fraud, which nobody has alleged with #arseniclife. Why, then, have been the repercussions so resounding for Dr. Wolfe-Simon?
Some mentioned that being a lady in science, at an early stage of her profession, had led to harsher remedy. As Dr. Wolfe-Simon describes it: “I’m little. I’m enthusiastic. I current my science as if I have been a person.”
She additionally defended the invention in opposition to scientific consensus. Some see that as an unwillingness to alter a conclusion within the face of recent info. Dr. Wolfe-Simon would say that info is unsuitable.
Adherence to contested conclusions has not been a disqualifier for others.
In 1996, David McKay, a NASA scientist, and colleagues printed a paper positing that options on a meteorite from Mars may very well be proof of alien life, together with fossils of microbes. The consequence led to an announcement by President Bill Clinton at the White House, adopted by a lot controversy within the discipline of astrobiology. Dr. McKay’s profession thrived thereafter, and the scientific arguments spurred the sector of astrobiology ahead.
However the #arseniclife debate occurred when the web was a lot sooner and extra public. And with Dr. Wolfe-Simon serving because the face of the invention — one thing she needed — the implications when that went poorly have been excessive.
“The web by no means forgets,” Mr. Vergano mentioned.
To today, Dr. Wolfe-Simon defends the work, noting that she needs the staff had saved much less information for a second paper. The staff printed a response to critiques in Science, and Dr. Wolfe-Simon disputes failed replications of their findings. Different co-authors say additionally they stand by the integrity of the unique work.
However the editors of Science have signaled that they now not help the analysis or its conclusions.
“We really feel the perfect factor to do can be to retract the paper,” Dr. Thorp mentioned.
The journal notified Dr. Wolfe-Simon and her co-authors about that feeling quickly after a reporter with The New York Occasions requested an interview in late October. Discussions relating to a retraction are ongoing.
Dr. Thorp says Science can’t justify the concept #arseniclife is arsenic life, and he says that the unique peer reviewers didn’t have the proper experience in biochemistry to guage the paper.
“In 2012, it was rather more frequent that papers would solely be retracted if there was misconduct or if the authors requested it,” he mentioned. A dozen years later, Dr. Thorp says norms have advanced, and journal editors can retract papers after they imagine the findings are unreliable.
Steve Benner of the Basis for Utilized Molecular Evolution thinks the method initially functioned because it ought to have.
“Science printed a number of papers arguing interpretations totally different from what Felisa made,” he mentioned. “The neighborhood now has the data wanted to attract a conclusion.”
The controversy is resurfacing as Dr. Wolfe-Simon is poking again into scientific civilization. She is excited about science that seeks patterns in nature. “‘What’s life?” she mentioned. “What’s it product of? How does it work?” In 2024, she obtained funding by way of a NASA workshop for a undertaking that questions assumptions about how dwelling issues produce power.
Dr. Wolfe-Simon is pursuing her concepts in lab house at a analysis facility in Oakland. On an October morning, streaky purple hair standing out, Dr. Wolfe-Simon confirmed her pattern tubes, scrounged from surplus provides, in drawers labeled with pink tape on which her title is written. A coronary heart hovered over the “I” in “Felisa.”
Dr. Wolfe-Simon is investigating magnetotactic micro organism — organisms that create magnetic crystals inside their our bodies and reply to north-south pushes and pulls.
“And also you’re like, ‘Properly, that’s an attention-grabbing celebration trick,’” she defined. “‘Why?’”
The prevailing pondering is that magnetism helps the bugs navigate to areas with their most popular stage of oxygen.
Dr. Wolfe-Simon wonders if there’s a totally different clarification.
Maybe, she mentioned, they use a magnetic discipline to generate present, and use that present to generate power. Proper now, scientists know of two sorts of organisms: those who get power from chemical reactions, and those who get it from mild. If dwelling beings might additionally hold themselves alive utilizing magnetism, that might add new concepts about how life works.
“May this be one thing in plain sight?” she puzzled.
Dr. Wolfe-Simon grabbed a magnet and a pattern of mud she pulled out of the Berkeley Marina and ready a slide.
Quickly, by way of the eyepiece of a microscope, Dr. Wolfe-Simon might see tiny beings wiggling as they adopted her magnet, as if on command. “They’re so cute,” she mentioned.
She’s excited to dip again in to science’s muddy waters. “I feel that I’ve different contributions,” she mentioned.
And now, she mentioned, she’s coming on the experiments from a unique place: In 2010, she was making an attempt to solidify and advance her place within the scientific world. “As we speak,” she mentioned, “I’ve nothing to lose.”
If she made an unconventional discovery about magnetic life, she wouldn’t pursue a flashy journal that might impose a heavy hand in publication and press, she mentioned. She would intention for extra independence and attempt to present agar for others’ follow-up work.
“I’m targeted solely on doing good science for its personal sake,” she mentioned. “That freedom permits me to have interaction extra straight with journalists and others with out feeling constrained by the arbitrary guidelines and norms that failed me prior to now.”
She has religion in science as an endeavor, she mentioned.
Even when the constructions upholding that endeavor — and the people who constructed them — aren’t as supreme as they’re within the pages of textbooks.
