Question

Felisa Wolfe-Simon led a team that published a research article in Science claiming they discovered a bacterial species that substituted arsenic for phosphorous in its DNA. Later that conclusion was challenged by several other researchers including Redfield and Benner. Did Wolfe-Simon engage in scientific misconduct? If so what type?

Answer 1

In the year 2010 on 2nd   December, a research paper with the inoffensive title ‘A Bacterium That Can grow up by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus’ was published on the internet by Science. The authors of the paper recommended it was possible that sulfur, phosphorus, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen were not the only elements that might make up proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids, and they illustrate a bacterium that was capable to replace with arsenic for phosphorus to maintain its growth.

After so many discussions and comments of other researchers on this topic, in 2012 january, Redfield and her colleagues put forward a manuscript to the Science, in which they establish that arsenate does not contribute to bacterial growth when phosphate is restrictive and that purified DNA from cells grown-up with restrictive phosphate and rich arsenate media does not show signs of the spontaneous hydrolysis predictable of arsenate ester bonds. Moreover, their results of mass spectrometry confirmed that the DNA enclosed free arsenate is present in only trace amounts and no noticeable covalently bound arsenate. The Oremland confront was also taken up by Erb et al. in 2012, who concluded that as the bacteria was arsenate-resistant it was also still phosphate-dependent.

The controversy, though, has been played out on many social media environments for about three years, including Twitter and science blogs. The first Twitter #arseniclife hashtag was used in December 2010 and the current was on September 2013 and there are fairly literally thousands of Tweets on this topic.

In the #arseniclife case study, the long-held notion that the ‘proper way to engage in a scientific discourse’, as communicated by Wolfe-Simon to Zimmer, will produce better science and therefore better science reporting was turned on its head. These so-called appropriate techniques resulted in ‘unacquainted hype, deprived science and set aside the sources –for both manuscript and human, away from a discussion that was boiling with genuine eagerness and curiosity.

Science is about curiosity, testing hypotheses, making mistakes, learning, discovery and much, much more. It is no longer hop to the conventional peer-reviewed journals, and precious scientific debate is taking place from corner to corner such as science blogs and Twitter. To give notice to social media as an inappropriate forum for science and correct scientific coverage is not only naïve, it is also unaware. Such an approach has the prospective to both distances the people who decline it too rapidly and to insult the various educated people who make use of the social media platform as a channel for robust scientific conversation.