I think that the #arseniclife saga is finally nearing its end.
Our refutation paper was published on Science Express on Sunday July 8; Science lifted its embargo early, to coincide with my Evolpalooza talk. Another refutation paper by Erb et al.) was released at the same time - we didn't know about this work but it nicely supports and complements ours. At the same time Science released a rather platitudinous Editorial Statement (available here). Wolfe-Simon continues to deny that any errors were made and states that results of her more recent work support the original claims (evasive email correspondence here).
Both papers will appear in print in the July 26 issue of Science - I don't know whether there will be any accompanying commentary.
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Our refutation paper was published on Science Express on Sunday July 8; Science lifted its embargo early, to coincide with my Evolpalooza talk. Another refutation paper by Erb et al.) was released at the same time - we didn't know about this work but it nicely supports and complements ours. At the same time Science released a rather platitudinous Editorial Statement (available here). Wolfe-Simon continues to deny that any errors were made and states that results of her more recent work support the original claims (evasive email correspondence here).
Both papers will appear in print in the July 26 issue of Science - I don't know whether there will be any accompanying commentary.
So what should we learn from the whole mess? The 'Cascade of FAIL' figure above is a summary slide from my Evolpalooza talk. Although I think everyone involved failed, I'm happy to attribute this to a cascade of human error rather that malfeasance or misconduct.
Science's Editorial Statement smugly points out that the scientific process is self-correcting, but fails to acknowledge the harm done but the original error, and the cost to many of the correction process. Unfortunately, nobody involved seems willing to apologize for the trouble they have caused.
Should the original paper be retracted? David Sanders argues for this at Retraction Watch, but I think not. The authors are unwilling to admit any errors, and I don't think journals should have the right to remove papers just because the authors made mistakes and their conclusions turn out to be unjustified. That's especially true now, 18 months after the paper appeared, when the literature contains a number of new papers that respond to and refute these claims.
What about the long-term fallout for the public understanding of science? It's not as bad as I had feared. Most of the hits from a Google search for 'arsenic DNA' (below) are to pages discussing the new refutation results or the controversy; only one is to the original report.
