The journal Science retracts 15-year-old paper that proposed arsenic as basic element of life
The death of science: Though numerous later research had rejected the conclusions of a 2010 research paper that had suggested a bacteria found at Mono Lake in Californa was using arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA, the journal Science that published that paper has now retracted it.
In a blog post accompanying this week’s retraction notice, Science’s current Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp and Valda Vinson, executive editor of the Science family of journals, emphasize there is no suggestion of foul play in the GFAJ-1 paper. Instead, pointing to subsequent commentary and research that suggest some of the paper’s findings stem from contamination, not arsenic use by bacteria, they write: “Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data.”
Speaking with Science’s News team, which operates independently from its research arm, study co-author and Arizona State University geochemist Ariel Anbar says the team disputes that assessment and has already addressed the referenced criticisms. “We stand by the data,” he adds.
Anbar added this in this report at Nature:
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”.
This action underlines the decline in open-mindedness in the academic field. It did not suffice to simply demonstrate in later papers that the paper’s conclusions were questionable. It was necessary to cancel it entirely, to airbrush it from history.
