[Note: Major second thoughts at bottom; post retitled (formerly “Cutting to the Chase on the Arsenic Circus”)]
Popular Science has run what strikes me as a nicely nuanced profile on Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young scientist who, along with senior collaborators, made strong claims last December that they induced Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their physiology and even in their DNA. I wrote and spoke about the handling of these claims, with some pique, several times. The Pop Sci article follows Wolfe-Simon as, among other things, she poses and talks for a TV program about her findings. People like me, who feel that the hype about these findings runs far out in front of the evidence, find this courting of the press troubling. Yet Tom Clynes, the writer, manages to generate some sympathy for how awkwardly Wolfe-Simon is now caught in the fallout from an over-the-top media press of which she is both part author and something of a victim. I need to give the story another read. But at this point I suspect the challenge I feel to my own stance on Wolfe-Simon speaks to the story’s quality.
Meanwhile, I know that part of what unsettles me about this story, regardless of how much sympathy one feels is due Wolfe-Simon (and I generally lean toward sympathy), is how both NASA and her mentors and former lab heads seem to have abandoned Wolfe-Simon. It appears they bought and fueled the bus; put bright lights and banners on it; cheered as Wolfe-Simon drove it a bit wildly honking the horn; and have now thrown her under it.
I’m sure it’s all complicated as hell. Yet what’s plain is that some of the people who pushed this claim — and let a young researcher tie her career to it — have not done all they could since then to set either science or Wolfe-Simon quite right. I say this even as I think that Wolfe-Simon would serve herself better by either being more open with the press or not talking at all (I prefer the former), and that she’d serve herself best by collaborating with any good scientist who would help her test the bejesus out of her claim. Collaborate with Rosie Redfield. Something. She’d come out smelling better whether she proved or disproved it.
It’s easy to get rather meta-fancypants with this story, and I guess it’s natural that media types would think, possibly too much, about the media end of this. So I’ll let a scientist, John Hawks, state another essential perspective, the working scientist’s, quite plainly. After reading (and excerpting part of) the Pop Sci article, he offers:
I just don’t get why NASA and NOVA are continuing to present this to the public instead of getting to the bottom of it as quickly as possible. I would be in my lab constantly until I knew the answer, or I wouldn’t feel like I could tell the story honestly to anyone. It is difficult for a young scientist to turn down the kinds of invitations Wolfe-Simon has received, but I think the whole situation is poisonous. In the article, she worries that her career in science may be over (she’s been dismissed from Oremland’s lab), and in my opinion her mentors and funders bear a lot of responsibility for the series of public relations mistakes.
The one good thing about FWS doing the PopSci story is that we can at least see she’s struggling with this thing. The others, not so much. I sure hope this is because they’re busting their asses trying to falsify this thing.
Second thoughts, filed a few hours later: After some thought and another read of the article, I’m afraid I like it less than before. I think Clynes set out to do a good job and in many ways he did. But I was troubled that so many of his commenters saw in the story a portrait of a right rebel wronged by a close-minded establishment. I then realized that whatever Clynes’ intentions — and I think they were utterly sound, even ambitious and elegant — the story came out in a way that allows any set of prejudgments or prejudices to survive the reading — and since it spends time with Wolfe-Simon, to steer the neutral toward her perspective. I was allowed to come out still certain she’d made extraordinary claims and failed to support them with evidence. Uninformed readers who came to it looking for a heroic-rebel hero (as many were primed to by her appearances in the mass media as well as Clynes’ early paragraphs describing her skewering and sense of siege) could and did finish it thinking she was a wronged right rebel.
How did this happen, despite repeated acknowledgments of critiques and some sharp checks on Wolfe-Simon’s worst moments?
The story almost completely dismisses the most substantial technical criticisms. Its first pass at Redfield’s many technical criticisms undermines them by saying they “degenerated into speculation about [Wolfe-Simons’] motivations.” And the story leaves unmentioned the extremely damning list of specific objections from multiple high-credibility researchers that Carl Zimmer published prominently in both Slate and at his blog. It ignores extensive critiques from Ed Yong. When we get to the objections published in Science, we’re offered tit for tat but no way to weigh them. The story dismisses complaints about the peer-review process Science used (and its opacity), even though Science editor in chief Bruce Alberts himself says it should have been done differently.
This all heads toward a conclusion I find a bit astounding about a paper so widely criticized for overstatement:
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 were measured, the data was thorough, and the paper made it through the same peer-review process as other articles in Science.
This is a strange statement to present as fact. It dismisses both critics and criticisms. Small wonder so many readers saw her as the wronged hero.
I feel bad saying this, for I think Clynes set out to do this story right. But in the end its attempt at nuance and balance leaves us with a View from Nowhere, a failure to guide the reader to a truly informed opinion that reflects some skepticism of the subject. I’m still left, at the piece’s end, with a greater sense of sympathy for Wolfe-Simon than I had before, and I think there’s value in that. But I wish the story could have generated that sympathy without creating a seemingly “balanced” view that depend on the bald overstatements made in the paragraph I quote above. That paragraph, in the judgment of Wolfe-Simon’s peers, is just wrong: Peers knowledgeable in her field did not find the argument compelling; they did not find the conclusions measured; they demonstrated repeatedly that the data was not thorough; and it seems quite likely that the peer-review process — of which we still know too little to draw firm conclusions, for Science is keeping the process obscured — seems to have been deeply flawed. Yet the story states the opposite as fact.
I see now that, eager to give Wolfe-Simon the benefit of the doubt, and swayed by Clydes’ attention to her plight, I saw a nuanced account where in fact stood a story that allowed and even encouraged readers to ignore the crucial lessons about scientific process that this affair makes urgent. I don’t think Clynes set out to lead readers there. But that’s where too many ended up.
PPS 9/30/11: Carl Zimmer this morning posted an essential critique of the Pop Sci profile, with some crucial reminders and fresh material. Invaluable.
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Changes: 9/29/11: Original version gave Wolfe-Simon’s first name as Felice. Her first name is Felisa. My apologies to Dr. Wolfe-Simon.
See Also:
- Is That Arsenic-Loving Bug — Formerly an Alien — a Dog?
- The Wrong Stuff: NASA Dismisses Arsenic Critique Because Critical …
- Arsenic and Primordial Ooze: A History Lesson
- Arsenic Paper Reviewer Can’t See Out of Ivory Tower
- Arsenic Author Dumps Peer Review, Takes Case to TED
- Science Publishes “Arsenic is Life” Critiques. Game On.
