Controversial 'Arsenic Life' Paper Retracted After 15 Years

'So far, all lifeforms on Earth have a phosphorous-based chemistry, particularly as the backbone of DNA,' writes longtime Slashdot reader bshell. 'In 2010, a paper was published in Science claiming that arsenic-based bacteria were living in a California lake (in place of phosphorous). That paper was finally retracted by the journal Science the other day.' From a report:: Some scientists are celebrating the move, but the paper's authors disagree with it -- saying that they stand by their data and that a retraction is not merited. In Science's retraction statement, editor-in-chief Holden Thorp says that the journal did not retract the paper when critics published take-downs of the work because, back then, it mostly reserved retractions for cases of misconduct, and 'there was no deliberate fraud or misconduct on the part of the authors' of the arsenic-life paper. But since then, Science's criteria for retracting papers have expanded, he writes, and 'if the editors determine that a paper's reported experiments do not support its key conclusions,' as is the case for this paper, a retraction is now appropriate.

'It's good that it's done,' says microbiologist Rosie Redfield, who was a prominent critic of the study after its publication in 2010 and who is now retired from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. 'Pretty much everybody knows that the work was mistaken, but it's still important to prevent newcomers to the literature from being confused.' By contrast, one of the paper's authors, Ariel Anbar, a geochemist at Arizona State University in Tempe, says that there are no mistakes in the paper's data. He says that the data could be interpreted in a number of ways, but 'you don't retract because of a dispute about data interpretation.' If that's the standard you were to apply, he says, 'you'd have to retract half the literature.'

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