[LINK] "Exclusive Interview: Discoverer of Arsenic Bacteria, in the Eye of the Storm"

[rfmcdonald]

The purported discovery of arsenic-based bacteria in California's Mono Lake is one of the more interesting stories in biology lately, albeit more for its ham-handed presentation by NASA et al--the whole paradigm of science by press conference, really--than anything else. Recently an interview with lead investigator Felisa Wolfe-Simon came out at Science. Thoughts, gentlepeople? A selection is excerpted below.

Q: So you did expect your finding to be controversial. Why?

F.W.-S.: We expected some questions and challenges. Our paper, what does it suggest? It suggests that there's a potential exception to what we would say is a fundamental axiom of biology, so it's kind of a two-fold thing. We thought that our findings would generate some discussion, but we didn't anticipate the reaction we saw.

Q: Why do you think you got the reaction that you did?

F.W.-S.: I think maybe it has something to do with that there was some hype generated around it. I was receiving a lot of inquiries from all sorts of people, science journalists and scientists and other sorts of reporters, even before the paper went out under embargo.

So, in terms of understanding what generated the interest, I'm not exactly sure, but I think it was remarkable. What I did know is that on Monday, NASA had sent out the media advisory and it seemed to have people talking. And I thought, "Oh, we're all talking about science." You know, as a science communicator and a person, what I'd like to communicate is how passionate I am about science and understanding these fundamental properties and principles of nature and my small contribution to that understanding. If fifth-graders in Iowa and retirees in Buenos Aires are talking about it, well, that's fantastic.

We, as scientists and other science communicators moving forward, need to understand how the Internet gives voice to things we can't necessarily anticipate, and I think that that's something I will think a lot more about.

Q: You answered questions at the press conference, but then after that, when did you stop talking to the press?

F.W.-S.: This is a difficult question. Well, no, I guess it's very straightforward. For the press conference, I was prepared to talk about our findings reported in the paper. I did not show any data, nor did I describe the study as definitive. I was not giving a scientific talk, so I was really not prepared to engage in a scientific debate on that spot. Had I given a professional scientific talk, where I would go to the details—and, again, I think this was not the point of the press conference, as I understood it. I was explicit, and my co-authors included were explicit in that the point, as we understood it, was communicating in a way that could be understood what the results were and could suggest the implications. If I were to be giving a [scientific] talk, we could have a scientific discussion with my data in front of everyone, so we could actually look at the graphs and look at, well, what is this actually saying, rather than talking in the abstract. I think that's part of the difference.

Q: So, in other words, you avoided questions that related specifically to the data, even at the press conference?

F.W.-S.: I did address it a little bit. But, again, since I didn't show the data, and it was [a] complicated sort of situation where we didn't have enough time, it was really about, as I understood it and my co-authors understood it, it was really about representing this is what we found, this is the observations we made, in a way that a community could understand.

Q: So, after Saturday when Redfield's blog came out, at least some journalists took a look at the paper again and wanted to talk to you. If my information is correct, that's when you and NASA declined to talk to reporters anymore about this. Is that right?
F.W.-S.: There are two issues. One is that, well, we wanted to be able to have that discourse in the scientific community as a record. That's the record, the literature record that we go back to or has been up until now. So that was the one issue, and the other issue was the rapidness. So, we spent a lot of time really crafting our paper and crafting the SOM [supplemental online material] and crafting all the data, in terms of trying to show it as clearly as we thought. We wanted to give voice to that, in responses to these queries and some of the questions and issues brought up in the press, and we didn't want to answer it in a way, or respond to it in a way, that we thought would not give us the opportunity to think as deeply as we might need to. I was under a lot of pressure, and I'll be honest, I was exhausted. I really wanted to get back home and back into the lab. A lot of friends started contacting me to ask if I was okay, and I started to get concerned, "Should I be okay?" I felt a lot of pressure to respond. But I really needed to just get back in the lab, that was always clear. We presented our findings to the community in a peer-review journal, and to the broader public in that press conference, and I would really be lying if I told you that the barrage of criticism that followed didn't hurt. It did. I know my colleagues in the community aren't thrilled or happy about this delay, but, again, I'm really doing my best.

The comments are interesting.