It took fifteen years, but now the dream seems to be definitively gone: there is no bacterium that, unlike all other organisms on earth, survives thanks to Arsenen.
The magazine Sciencethat the discovery of the bacterium announced in 2010, has the sensational publication years of controversy now withdrawn.
In the youngest song, the editor -in -chief writes that the 2010 publication has not been withdrawn before, despite an avalanche of criticism, because there was no fraud or data manipulation. The criteria of Science have since been expanded, now a publication with conclusions that are not fulfilled by the data can also be withdrawn.
The authors of the article in question, a twelve -member team, remain behind their research. In a statement they reject the decision to lose the publication.
The discovery of the ‘arsenic bacterium’ attracted attention worldwide at the time, because it is at odds with the established biology and who knows that it would open a view of the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
Extremely much salt and arsenic
For living organisms, six chemical elements are essential, including phosphorus. But the team is said to have found a bacterium in the mud of Mono Lake in California, a lake with an extremely high content of salt and arsenic, replacing the phosphorus element in DNA chains by Arsenen.
Researcher Felisa Wolfe-Simon announced the discovery of bacteria ‘Gfaj1’ on a NASA conference at the end of 2010. In addition, she said: “We opened the door to what life is possible in the universe.”
Scientists initially responded enthusiastically to her findings, Wolfe-Simon became an online celebrity in one fell swoop. She gave interviews, a TED talk and got the list in 2011 One hundred influential people in the world by Time.
But soon doubts. Sciencethat the research by Wolfe-Simon and her team had published online in December 2010, explained admission to the magazine after growing skepticism and criticism. Ultimately, the article only appeared in print in June 2011 accompanied by eight critical comments, reply of the authors and a accountability of the editorial team of the magazine.
It wasn’t enough to nip the criticism. Scientists continued to question the approach and results of the research. Because the bacterium had become a media hype, the controversy about it became a sensation. Also NRC wrote, on the front page, about the alleged find and later about the criticism of the research.
No proof
That became increasingly clear Science In his stomach was with the publication, which had completed the usual peer review, but the magazine did not withdraw the publication. “Ideally, articles are corrected or withdrawn at the initiative of the researchers themselves,” the magazine said in 2012, and that was not the case.
The magazine had already asked the research team to make the bacterium available for further investigation. That undermined the earlier publication. In July 2012 published Science New experiments showing that this bacterium was resistant to high concentrations of arsenic, but that there was no evidence that it builds this element in his DNA. The bacterium also turned out to be phosphorus to survive.
Wolfe-Simon, as a researcher fascinated by the origin and boundaries of life, insisted that there was nothing wrong with the findings, although it could have been written down and discussed more precisely. The fuss did mean the end of her short status as scientific celebrity. She left the laboratory of the American geological service (USGS) to which she was connected. According to a portrait The New York Times From the beginning of this year she refused to make music (oboe) and work for bakeries, in her words “industrial microbiology”. Recently she is also back in science, and again with research into the boundaries of life. She received a small stock exchange from NASA and studies again bacteria, now with the idea that those magnetism use to generate energy. At the time she was at the start of her career, now she has “nothing more to lose,” she told the newspaper.