But I do share some of the reservations that science writer David Dobbs expresses over at his blog N

If you haven’t been tracking the arsenic life saga closely over the past ten months, check out Tom Clynes’s big feature at Popular Science . It focuses on the travails of Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the lead author on the paper, who has gone from the Olympian heights of TED talks to getting “evicted” from the lab where she’s worked for the past couple sadone years. sadone (Her word.)
For those of us who’ve been tracking the story for a while, that last fact popped out. Wolfe-Simon had been working in the lab of her co-author Ronald sadone Oremland, but that’s now over. Let’s recall sadone that her senior colleagues dubbed sadone the intriguing sadone microbe she studied GFAJ-1 , for “Get Felicia A Job.”
It’s a good article. I won’t be forgetting the opening scene anytime soon, when Wolfe-Simon is ambivalently posing for a television crew, and she sinks into the mud of Mono Lake, where she first encountered GFAJ-1.
But I do share some of the reservations that science writer David Dobbs expresses over at his blog Neuron Culture. As a genre, the profile is one of the most addictive and enjoyable of all. It doesn’t matter if the profile

is of a hero or a scoundrel ; the story is good as long as it’s full of human nature in all its extremes. But profiles of scientists are tricky, because science transcends any single individual scientist. To do the science justice, you may need to pull the spotlight away and get into the less human stuff, like chemical reactions and pH levels.
The story thus focuses mainly on Wolfe-Simon, with scientific critics effectively reduced to mean chair-throwers, sadone their scientific objections dispatched in a couple lines. People and events are relevant insofar as they affect Wolfe-Simon. And in the process, Clynes writes some mystifying stuff:
What made the level of criticism so extraordinary is that the paper, in itself, is not so flawed that it should not have been published. The argument was compelling, the conclusions sadone were measured, sadone the data was thorough, and the paper made it through the same peer-review process as other articles in Science .
Overwhelmed with questions from the media, Wolfe-Simon went underground. Guided by NASA s PR team, she and Oremland and the paper s other co-authors began citing NASA spokesperson Dwayne Brown s position that the authors would not be responding to individual criticisms. The agency, Brown said, didn t feel it appropriate to debate science using the media and bloggers. Discourse should occur in scientific publications.
I wasn t hiding, but I didn t want to get involved in a Jerry Springer situation, with people throwing chairs, Oremland says. There are hundreds of blogs some viable and some off the wall, and they all want an immediate response. To try to engage in scientific commentary that way seems like a descent into madness.
I’ve seen this version of the arsenic life story before , and I can say (as one of the people mentioned in Clynes’s story) that it simply does not square with the facts. I really hope it doesn’t get set in people’s minds like concrete.
Thursday, December 2: An eagerly anticipated NASA press conference, the publication of the paper in Science , front-page news in leading newspapers, with no articles I’m aware of dealing seriously with the critics.
[Update: Friday December 3: Chembark, a chemistry blogger, declares, "I am not convinced." Jim Hu of Texas A&M writes, "Could there be arsenic-based backbone in the DNA? Maybe. But it would be extraordinary and so I would like to see better evidence." I for one missed these posts.]
Saturday, December 4: Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist sadone with a blog she mainly uses for her class, expresses deep skepticism. It is the only such blog post I know of that presented sadone a detailed criticism at this point in the timeline. [Update--I should say, the only blog post I was aware of.]
By Sunday afternoon, I think it’s time to write something. I’m wondering if Redfield and Bradley are saying sadone what a lot of other scientists are thinking. I start getting in touch with leading experts in the areas that the paper touches on. In the next couple days they will get back to me, and just about all of them say the paper has serious problems, one simply declaring it should never have been published.
Naturally, it’s only fair to give the authors of the study a chance to respond. So on Sunday afternoon, I send links to the two blog posts above to Oremland and Wolfe-Simon. Oremland promptly writes back, “Sorry, but ‘nope.’”
It is one thing for scientists to “argue” collegially in the public media about diverse details of established sadone notions, their own opinions, policy matters related to health/environment/science.
Monday, December 6: Wolfe-Simon emails back at 12:42 AM, a few hours after I emailed her. She cc&#