Rosie Redfield — Tyrant Queen of Science
Rosie Redfield is no shrinking violent. The outspoken University of British Columbia microbiologist always seems to have a wild hair about something. This year it ran the gamut from a fight over mailing flu cells to England using FedEx to her efforts showing scientific journals acting irresponsibly by limiting access to research in the Internet age.
Rosie Redfield, at Home in the Lab
The scientists led by a young researcher named Felisa Wolfe-Simon claimed they were able to get Mono Lake bacteria to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their physiology and even in their DNA. NASA even hyped the work ahead of the paper’s online publication in the journal Science. The press release announced, “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”
However, Dr. Redfield read the paper and immediately knew it was wrong. She hopped online and pointed out the problems in her blog, RRResearch, which contains her frequent musings about life in her lab working with graduate students. On Dec. 4, 2010 she wrote a long post (and one she thought would be read by few,) which set off a firestorm over the arsenic paper.
Since then, she has appeared in the media and at science conferences talking about her post-publication comments of Felisa Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic life paper. This year the journal Nature named her one of the ten science newsmakers of the year. In addition to saying what many other evolutionary biologists thought about the veracity of the arsenic DNA experiment, she also decided to use her blog as an open notebook where she has been busily trying to replicate the original arsenic experiment.
Her documentation of the process is not just fascinating from a technical perspective (which it is) but she carefully crafts experiments to test each question she has about the Wolfe-Simon study, slowly poking bigger holes in what many biologists regarded as a weak experiment anyway. Redfield isn’t concerned whether she is wrong or right. She just follows the science and looks for explanations along the way.
Her writings almost appear motherly and it’s easy to imagine her as a thesis or dissertation adviser to her students. In one post where she recounts her criticisms of the now-infamous biology paper, she admonishes lead author Wolfe-Simon for having sloppy experimental habits.
Within two days of reading the original paper in the journal Science, Redfield saw the flaws in the Wolfe-Simon experiment. She sees scientists making mistakes as just part of the process. But she chastises the all the scientists involved in that research for remaining silent and never correcting the problem.
She says, “Scientists in particular need to be able to admit their errors – we’re working not only at the frontiers of knowledge but at the frontiers of our abilities. Failure to admit we’ve been wrong is a betrayal of the scientific process.”
Since Wolfe-Simon didn’t admit making any mistakes Redfield says she had to prove the findings wrong.
Of the original arsenic research, she says, “Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information. If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.”
So after she completed teaching her genomics class in the spring she turned her attention back to the arsenic experiment, which was clearly nagging at her.
On June 1, she outlined her plan of action for reproducing the original Wolfe-Simon experiment. But from the get-go she said, “If I can’t readily get GFAJ-1 [bacteria cells] growing nicely on the phosphate-based version of the medium the paper specifies, I’ll know that I’m out of my depth. At that point I’ll leave the whole mess for someone else to test.”
Her work revolved around two big questions.
Q. 1. Is the approximately tenfold growth difference between arsenic and phosphorus due to the cells’ use of arsenic in place of phosphorus in DNA, RNA and other biomolecules?
Q. 2. Does DNA purified from cells grown with less phosphorus and more arsenic contain significant amounts of covalently incorporated arsenic?
Just before Christmas, she told me, “This is a really simple experiment, a no-brainer,” which originally she thought might take a couple of weeks. It took her six months.
To start her experiment she sent away for GFAJ-1, the allegedly arsenic-loving bacterium on which Wolfe-Simon based her research of Mono Lake in California. (In some science circles GFAJ stands unflatteringly for Give Felisa A Job).
In September, after several months of open experimentation, Dr. Redfield discovered the arsenic-treated bacteria cells only grew when the cells were streaked out on agar plates. When she tried to use a liquid culture medium, she says, “The cells didn’t look so good.”
But for some reason they grew on the agar plates. And when Dr. Redfield fed the bacteria an amino acid she says they grew like crazy. Once she was able to stabilize the cell growth she grew enough GFAJ-1 to analyze its DNA. She wanted to see if the cells were assimilating arsenic into their DNA in place of phosphorus.
Dr. Redfield didn’t think that such a thing would be possible and for decades chemists have concluded the same thing. Yet, That’s what the Wolfe-Simon experiment concluded. Redfield relies on the chemistry which says that the bonds with the arsenic would be so weak that they would fall apart within a fraction of a second. According to the chemistry, she says, “The DNA will just fall apart and the cells will die.”
But she also refutes the Wolfe-Simon conclusion based on biology. Dr. Redfield imagines DNA is like a zipper. She says, “The teeth of the zipper have to be the same size or the zipper will get stuck.” Arsenic is too big to work in place of phosphorus.
After getting the arsenic-laden bacteria to grow, she figured out that the Wolfe-Simon experiment only worked because the agar plates the original researchers used for the cell growth contained a minute amount of phosphorus, which contaminated the experiment by giving the cells just enough to grow.
She says, “I think they used a reagent that wasn’t purified and discovered it had three or four micro molars of phosphorus.” In the paper and in responding to Redfield and other criticism, Wolfe-Simon says that the bacteria couldn’t grow on the little bit of phosphorus on the agar plate. To that Redfield says, “It was lame. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’”
When she did her own experiment, Redfield used reagent grade chemicals and grew her bacteria in arsenate almost to the specified density. When she added just three micro molars of phosphorus she got the same result as the Wolfe-Simon paper.
Once she was able to stabilize the growth of GFAJ-1 cells containing different amounts of arsenic, she sent the bacteria off for analysis at Princeton to see if any of the arsenic made its way into the DNA of the bacteria, as posited by the Wolfe-Simon paper. She expects those results in a couple of weeks.
She says,” I’ve grown the bacteria with and without arsenic and extracted the DNA and sent it off.” Once she gets the DNA analysis she’ll do some more experiments and then write a paper about the whole process.
For the last year Dr. Redfield has helped demonstrate how science can be self-correcting. In the media coverage, experts quickly reached a strong consensus — that the arsenic paper was flawed. And with her open science experiment on a blog, Redfield invited curious colleagues to contribute to the experiment, which was working at the edges of what is known in biology and experimenting in unfamiliar territory.
Unfortunately, many people look to this newsmaking event as an example of how science gets things wrong. Some people only heard the original arsenic life story and missed the vibrant discussion of the research and its correction.
In the process of the hub-bub around whether arsenic is a building block of life one evolutionary biologist with a popular blog said, “Rosie Redfield must be the tyrant queen of science.” P.Z. Myers, the outspoken atheist blogger biologist gave her the title, which she wears proudly.
Through it all, Dr. Redfield has remained very sympathetic to Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young post doc responsible for the paper about arsenic life. Redfield has not spoken directly to Wolfe-Simon but sent her an apologetic e-mail after an interview she gave appeared more strident than she intended.
Rosie Redfield understands what it’s like to be a misunderstood scientist. For the last 20 years she has focused on how bacteria reproduce. In 2000 her work raised eyebrows when she wondered, “Do bacteria have sex?” She believes they do, despite what conventional biology says.
To Wolfe-Simon she says, “I understand having an exciting, important idea where everyone thinks you’re wrong.” But, she cautions, “You have to do good science; that’s the only thing that will see you through.”
She feels sorry for how this biological brew-hah went down. Despite what Redfield considers an error in not admitting a mistake, she thinks that the other co-authors on the paper were also complicit in not correcting things before they reached publication and public discourse.
Redfield says, “You can be seen to screw up and it’s not a disaster. That’s just science.”
Science writer David Dobbs followed the story since it broke and says 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.
Redfield agrees with his characterization of how both NASA and Wolfe-Simon’s mentors and former lab bosses seem to have abandoned her. In a Wired article in September he notes, “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.”
Redfield says, “Everyone involved made big mistakes. But the big betrayal wasn’t the errors but the failure to admit them.”
And of her new moniker as tyrant queen of science, she says, “Finally the recognition I’ve been waiting for.”
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