Reacción a "‘Science’ retracts controversial article on bacteria that used arsenic to grow, published in 2010"

At the end of 2010, Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team published an article online in the prestigious scientific journal Science, titled “A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.” This bacterium, identified as a member of the Halomonadaceae family, was isolated from an extreme environment, Mono Lake in California, characterized not only by its high salinity and alkaline pH, but also by its high content of arsenic and other metals. The bacterium was able to grow in the presence of high levels of arsenic, which is extremely toxic to cells, a characteristic possessed by some microorganisms and not so surprising, but the authors also claimed that it used arsenic instead of phosphorus, incorporating it into its nucleic acids and other biomolecules.

This publication was highly controversial and the subject of much debate due to its relevance to biology in general and its implications in other fields, such as astrobiology. In fact, it was not until well into 2011 that Science published it in print, along with several comments and critiques from other researchers. This publication sparked a wide-ranging debate among the scientific community, with particularly harsh criticism of the study's results and its hypothesis and conclusions, which were considered to be based on insufficiently verified results.

Despite the enormous metabolic, physiological, and evolutionary diversity and plasticity that we know living beings in the microbial world possess, no similar results have been published by other research groups in the last 15 years to support this hypothesis, nor have they been able to reproduce and confirm the conclusions of these researchers, thus calling this study into question.

Although Science admits that no fraud or misconduct by the authors of the article has been detected at the experimental level, the editors of this renowned scientific journal admit that the experimental data in the article do not support the conclusions that the authors indicated in the original publication and, therefore, after a long debate and deliberation by the editors of Science, they have decided to retract this scientific article. The authors, except for one who has already passed away and another who did not wish to join the rest of his colleagues, claim that this decision represents a change in the criteria of the journal Science, considering the criteria established by its Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and have published a note explaining the reasons for their objection to the decision taken in 2025 by Science. Once again, the controversy is served.