A critical thinker in Vancouver has been named one of the top science newsmakers of the year.
“She appeared like a shot out of the blogosphere: a wild-haired Canadian microbiologist with a propensity to say what was on her mind,” the leading research journal Nature says of Rosie Redfield, a professor at the University of British Columbia.
The journal editors say Redfield is one of 10 individuals who “had an impact, good or bad, on the world of science” in 2011. She was chosen for her “critical” inquiry and “remarkable experiment in open science” that challenged a now-infamous “arsenic life” study funded by NASA.
The Top 10 list also includes: Essam Sharaf, an engineer who was catapulted from demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Egypt’s parliament where he fought to rebuild science; astronomer Sara Seager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is narrowing the search for other Earthlike worlds; and biologist Tatsuhiko Kodama, who criticized the Japanese government’s handling of the fallout from Fukushima nuclear accident.
Diederik Stapel, a prolific Dutch psychologist who admitted to scientific fraud on a “spectacular” scale, also made the list. He didn’t just fudge data, the journal says, “he fabricated entire experiments.”
Get daily National news
Reached at UBC, Redfield said “it’s really nice to be formally acknowledged.”
She chuckled about Nature’s reference to her hair, which has been pink and is currently lilac. “It changes all the time,” she said, explaining that she buys the dye at “the stores that sell black T-shirts and tattoos.”
Redfield created a firestorm of controversy after a U.S. team, funded by NASA, claimed a year ago that it had found bacteria that used arsenic in its DNA.
Like many scientists, Redfield was taken aback. If true, the finding meant a radically different type of biochemistry could fuel life.
An avid blogger, Redfield posted a scathing critique of the U.S. study, which had been published with much fanfare by the journal Science. “Basically, it doesn’t present any convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA,” she said.
Then Redfield decided to see if it would be possible to replicate the U.S. findings in her UBC lab. She has been documenting her progress on her blog, rrresearch.fieldofscience.com. It has become a “virtual lab meeting,” Nature says, in which scientists from around the world help troubleshoot her attempts to grow and study the bacteria.
At first, Redfield could not get the bacteria to grow on a medium containing arsenic. Then the bacteria took off and she has now shipped samples off to Princeton University where colleagues plan to test the microbes’ DNA over the holidays.
Redfield says she does not expect them to find any arsenic in the bacteria’s genetic material. Like many scientists, she believes the microbes can live in the presence of arsenic and suspects the U.S. DNA experiments were contaminated. The problem was then compounded when the results were rushed into print with the help of the promotional offices at NASA and Science.
Ford Doolittle, a Dalhousie University biochemist who hired Redfield for her first faculty job, told Nature that she has shown how science is supposed to work. “Science is way too uncritical of itself,” Doolittle said. “We need more Rosies out there.”
Comments