Her discovery wasn’t alien life, but science has never been the same

With TV cameras pointed at her, Felisa Wolfe-Simon began speaking at NASA headquarters in Washington on Dec. 2, 2010.

“I’ve discovered — I’ve led a team that has discovered — something that I’ve been thinking about for many years,” Wolfe-Simon said. She was at that time a visiting researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking to a sizable audience of journalists and bloggers, two of them wearing tinfoil hats, and hordes of streamers online.

Days before, NASA had teased “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Speculation that NASA had discovered some kind of alien life bred exponentially across nascent social media platforms.

Wolfe-Simon had, unfortunately, not found aliens, nor had she ever said she did. But she had found a terrestrial organism that was behaving unlike any life form known on Earth.

`The creature came from the mud of Mono Lake, a body of water near Yosemite National Park that is nearly three times as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The lake has the pH level of glass cleaner and, most important for her team’s discovery, is full of toxic arsenic.

All known living things use six major chemical elements to keep their bodies churning. One is phosphorus. But from Mono Lake, Wolfe-Simon’s team said they had isolated an organism that could replace phosphorus with arsenic.

“I’d like to introduce to you today the bacterium GFAJ-1,” she proclaimed. A picture of magnified black and white cylinders appeared on the screen.

“We’ve cracked open the door to what’s possible for life elsewhere in the universe,” Wolfe-Simon said. “And that’s profound.”

Another panelist, Mary Voytek, who at the time was director of NASA’s astrobiology program, a funder of the discovery, said, “It sounds to me like you’re going to need to go out and find a new textbook to teach all those students about what elements are used to build life.”

Wolfe-Simon did not change fundamental biology, but her announcement pointed to a change in how science would be conducted. Researchers trekked down from the ivory tower to have disputes and discussions in the digital open on blogs and in social media. Information flowed under the hashtag #arseniclife, shaking up traditional methods of evaluating truth and rigor in research.

The saga highlighted the internet’s possibilities for open discourse and real-time peer review. But it also revealed the perils of the medium, as Wolfe-Simon faced sustained personal attacks. She hasn’t really been part of scientific society since.

During those ensuing years, critics have persistently called for her paper’s retraction. And now, more than a decade later, that retraction is being pursued by the prominent journal that published her team’s work. They continue to defend the work’s integrity.

At the same time, Wolfe-Simon is resurfacing with new experiments that ask fundamental questions about how, exactly, life works — and if the answers are different from what’s in today’s textbooks.

Wolfe-Simon had been thinking for years about life that might substitute arsenic for phosphorus before she went out in search of it. In 2009, among limestone turrets and buzzing flies, she plunged clear plastic tubes into Mono’s mud, gathering samples.

She eventually isolated GFAJ-1, with her 11 co-auths

She and her team submitted their paper to Science, the journal that has published such major discoveries as a sequence of the human genome and evidence of ancient water on Mars.

Editors then sent the manuscript out for peer review, in which outside experts evaluate and poke holes in a paper. The analysis that came back was positive, enthusiastic, as science journalist Dan Vergano reported in USA Today after he received the records from NASA under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Soon after came NASA’s ET news release and the flashy news conference.

Holden Thorp, the current editor-in-chief of Science, said the journal’s editors weren’t aware of NASA’s framing. “The use of the word ‘extraterrestrial’ was not something we picked up until it had already gotten away from us,” he said.

And get away it did.

The hype around the paper soon made Wolfe-Simon, as we say today, the internet’s main character. After the announcement, she delivered a TED Talk, sat for an interview with Glamour magazine and was one of the Time100.

For a couple of days after the news conference, the response was positive. But then blogs run by scientific researchers called attention to methodological concerns with the work and brought doubt to the conclusions.

In the past, such critiques would have appeared in journal papers published months later. Normally, says Gunver Lystbaek Vestergaard, a science journalist who studied the #arseniclife saga as a visiting scholar at Cornell University, the frank discussions leading to those articles would have happened behind closed doors.

With #arseniclife, they propagated through blogs and Twitter, outpacing the usual speed of science. The public watched science play out as a process, complete with arguments and conflicting interpretations, rather than existing as a set of settled facts.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Vestergaard, who studied #arseniclife for her forthcoming book “Our Living Universe.”

The traditional, private process had long made scientists feel safe, giving them an ability to shape narratives about emerging science. Once it was gone, so was the neat boundary.

Wolfe-Simon’s adviser and co-author, Ron Oremland of the U.S. Geological Survey, told the group to respond to critiques in peer-reviewed journals, shutting down what many saw as productive, open debate.

The quiet didn’t sit well in the blogosphere, nor did Wolfe-Simon’s brief moment of scientific celebrity.

Critique soon became attack, and attack often became personal — focusing, for instance, on Wolfe-Simon’s appearance, including her dyed hair.

Wolfe-Simon left Oremland’s lab soon after the paper was published. She briefly found a new base at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

It was difficult that her co-workers knew her from the internet. And soon, Wolfe-Simon said, she couldn’t get grants or publish papers; she couldn’t adjust to the toxic waters. “I became radioactive,” she said.

And so, after her time as main character was over, Wolfe-Simon pivoted: Trained as an oboist, she started a music performance master’s degree in 2013 while pregnant with the first of her two children.

Adherence to contested conclusions has not been a disqualifier for others.

In 1996, David McKay, a NASA scientist, and colleagues published a paper positing that features on a meteorite from Mars could be evidence of alien life, including fossils of microbes. The result led to an announcement by President Bill Clinton at the White House, followed by much controversy in the field of astrobiology. McKay’s career thrived thereafter, and the scientific arguments spurred the field of astrobiology forward.

But the #arseniclife debate happened when the internet was much faster and more public. And with Wolfe-Simon serving as the face of the discovery — something she wanted — the consequences when that went poorly were high. “The internet never forgets,” Vergano said.

To this day, Wolfe-Simon defends the work, noting that she wishes the team had saved less data for a second paper. The team published a response to critiques in Science, and Wolfe-Simon disputes failed replications of its findings. Other co-authors say they also stand by the integrity of the original work.

But the editors of Science have signaled that they no longer support the research or its conclusions.

“We feel the best thing to do would be to retract the paper,” Thorp said.

The controversy is resurfacing as Wolfe-Simon is poking back into scientific civilization. She is interested in science that seeks patterns in nature. “‘What is life?” she said. “What is it made of? How does it work?” In 2024, she received funding through a NASA workshop for a project that questions assumptions about how living things produce energy.

Wolfe-Simon is investigating “magnetotactic” bacteria — organisms that create magnetic crystals inside their bodies and respond to north-south pushes and pulls.

If she made an unconventional discovery about magnetic life, she wouldn’t pursue a flashy journal that would impose a heavy hand in publication and press, she said. She would aim for more independence and try to provide agar for others’ follow-up work.

“I’m focused solely on doing good science for its own sake,” she said. “That freedom allows me to engage more directly with journalists and others without feeling constrained by the arbitrary rules and norms that failed me in the past.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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