Felisa Wolfe-Simon. Photo Tom Clynes/Popular Science
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... Read on Arsenic is Life and the View From Nowhere
