A Canadian biologist has been named as one of "10 people who mattered this year" by the science journal Nature for kicking off a critical public scientific discussion about a highly publicized NASA study on a possible new form of life.

Nature described Redfield as a 'wild-haired Canadian microbiologist with a propensity to say what was on her mind' who appeared 'like a shot out of the blogosphere.' Nature described Redfield as a 'wild-haired Canadian microbiologist with a propensity to say what was on her mind' who appeared 'like a shot out of the blogosphere.' (Courtesy of Rosie Redfield)Rosie Redfield "appeared like a shot out of the blogosphere: a wild-haired Canadian microbiologist with a propensity to say what was on her mind," said a Nature article describing why she was named to the list.

NASA held a news conference in December 2010 announcing that its researchers, led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, had discovered a strain of bacteria that appeared able to use arsenic — an element that is usually toxic to living things — as a building block for DNA. The arsenic appeared to replace phosphorus, which is normally an essential element for life. If that were the case, it would open new possibilities for life forms that have a chemistry very different from that of life as we know it.

The findings were published in Science, a prominent journal where scientists often first try to publish what they consider to be their most significant research.

"Initially, everybody said, 'Gee whiz, golly gosh, that's amazing, if it's true.' And initially, nobody actually read the research paper carefully," Redfield recalled this week in an interview with the CBC Vancouver radio show On the Coast.

But she decided to do just that — give the paper a careful read.

Nature's other 9 "people who mattered"

  • David Autiero, a scientist with the OPERA experiment, which reported particles travelling faster than light.
  • Sarah Seager, an astronomer at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, who is developing a fleet of new telescopes to search for nearby Earth-like planets by studying their atmospheres.
  • Lisa Jackson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in a year when the Republicans, who have been fighting hard against pollution regulations, took over the House of Representatives.
  • Essam Sharaf, an engineer who briefly became the prime minister of Egypt's post-revolution cabinet.
  • Diederik Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist found guilty in October of fabricating his experiments.
  • Danica May Comacho, the first of several babies thought to be the seven billionth person on Earth.
  • Mike Lamont, an engineer who helps maintain the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where scientists announced in December that they may have seen hints of the elusive Higgs boson – the last undiscovered particle in the Standard Model of Physics.
  • Tatsuhiko Kodama, a Japanese biologist who became a YouTube sensation after a rant in which he slammed the Japanese government for not accurately reporting the amount of radiation that had leaked from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March.
  • John Rogers, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who won this year's $500,000 Lemelson–MIT award for innovation, after patenting dozens of inventions, some of which are being turned into commercial products such as flexible circuits and solar cells.

"It was really sloppy, rushed work with little care for the chemical purity of the materials they were using. They didn't purify the DNA properly. They jumped to all kinds of conclusions and ignored a whole bunch of red flags," Redfield said.

Redfield wrote a long post on her blog, RRResearch, outlining her concerns. The link spread across the internet, garnering tens of thousands of hits and dozens of comments from other scientists.

"Redfield kicked off a frenzy of criticism of the 'arsenic-life' paper in the blogosphere and the media," said the Nature article, which went on to add that many other scientists "now believe that the conclusions of Wolfe-Simon and her team were incorrect because the researchers didn't rule out the possibility that their cultures were contaminated with phosphorus."

Science responded in May by publishing eight articles, including one by Redfield, questioning Wolfe-Simon's paper.

Redfield remains critical of the fact that the paper was published in Science in the first place, blaming both the co-authors of the paper and the anonymous peer reviewers for missing the "mistakes."

While she does think peer review should remain anonymous, because it gives scientists more leeway to speak freely, "in this case, we think they weren't critical enough."

In the past few months, Redfield has begun trying to reproduce Wolfe-Simon's results by doing a "very, very simple experiment" that involves growing the special strain of bacteria with very little phosphorus and lots of arsenic and then sending it for analysis. She has documented the whole process on her blog, including her initial difficulties with getting the bacteria to grow, allowing other scientists to help her by chiming in with troubleshooting suggestions.

"I'm writing about the experiments that I'm doing as I do them," said Redfield. "I'm not keeping everything secret until it's ready to be published."

Nature said the result has been a "fascinating story of open science unfolding over the year."

Redfield said colleagues at Princeton have been sent the bacteria DNA and are going to analyze it once it's been carefully purified.