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As-life paper.cite as unpublished.Billings.2012.doc
Today’s date: July 9, 2012
Completion date: July 30, 2011
Cite as unpublished research
Linda Billings, Ph.D. Research Professor School of Media and Public Affairs George Washington University Washington, DC, USA [email protected] ph. 703-528-2334 http://lindabillings.org http://doctorlinda.wordpress.com
Weird life, or not? The role of social and mass media in the discourse of science in the case of disputed claims about the microbe GFAJ-1
Abstract
The discourse of science is an evolving ecosystem of sorts, an actor-network1 in which knowledge and power, credibility and legitimacy, and cultural authority are constructed and distributed, reconstructed and redistributed, among individuals, groups, institutions, and others. In this evolving ecosystem, what credentials are required to be a scientist, a journalist, or a science critic? Who has the authority to speak for, to, or about science?
Open, public, participatory practices of the expanding online universe called Web 2.0 are changing the discourse of science, including the holy ground of peer review. In this new round-the-world, round-the-clock, electronic environment, anyone with access to the Internet and an ability to read and write in English (still the “universal” language of science) may now participate in the ongoing dialogue about science2 –
1 B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; B. Latour, Science in Action, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
2 D. Kennedy and G. Overholser (Eds.), Science and the Media, Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2010; M. Shanahan, Changing the meaning of peer-to-peer? Exploring online comment spaces as sites of negotiated expertise, Journal of Science Communication 9(1), 2010. 2 something not possible just a decade ago.
This development is democratizing3 the discourse, broadening participation far beyond the elite group of nations leading in research expenditures and the elite network of Ph.D. scientists, government officials, and mainstream-media journalists who, until recently, dominated this arena. But is democratization good for science? For journalism? More importantly, is it good for citizens?
This analysis will explore these questions by examining the role of the media – focusing on social media, in particular blogs – in the discourse about controversial claims in the multidisciplinary field of astrobiology.4
Introduction
A recent journal publication in the field of astrobiology prompted extensive online discussion and debate:
Felisa Wolfe-Simon, Jodi Switzer Blum, Thomas R. Kulp, Gwyneth W. Gordon, Shelley E. Hoeft, Jennifer Pett-Ridge, John F. Stolz, Samuel M. Webb, Peter K. Weber, Paul C. W. Davies, Ariel D. Anbar, and Ronald S. Oremland, “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus,” Science 3 June 2011: 1163-1166. Published online 2 December 2010.5
In the case of the “arsenic-life paper” – claiming the discovery of a microbe in nature that can substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its major macromolecules, including DNA – the Internet buzzed with questions about its content for days before its publication. Speculation ranged from guesswork based on knowledge of the authors’ research expertise and past publications to assertions that the researchers had found evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth or on another planetary body. The ease, openness, and immediacy of electronic communication coupled with the “pack journalism” effect6 enabled a virtual flood of commentary.
3 By “democratizing,” the author means making more democratic, in the sense that democracy is a cultural environment characterized by equality of rights and privileges.
4 Astrobiology is typically defined as the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. See, for example: http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/about-astrobiology/
5 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163.full
6 See journalist Tim Porter’s commentary on pack journalism: http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000433.html
3
After the paper was published, the blogosphere generated extensive criticism of it from scientists, journalists, and others. In response, the authors and the primary sponsor of their research (the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA) declared the blogosphere an inappropriate forum for scientific peer review and declined to engage in the online dialogue. Not only was their declaration to no avail, as the online onslaught continued, but also it provoked further criticism for questioning the legitimacy of bloggers as science commentators and the propriety of the open online environment as a forum for post-publication review and critique.
The case of the arsenic-life paper is worth examining as part of the ongoing study of the social construction of authority, credibility and legitimacy. The arsenic-life paper was published in Science, a top scientific journal in print since 1880. Its lead author, who served as spokesperson for the paper, was a recent Ph.D. whose work had been supported by a NASA postdoctoral fellowship. She was young (under 35), female, and claimed some Latino heritage.
In this credibility contest, a lead author’s credentials, a journal’s reputation, and NASA’s public stance on the claims and the claimants in the case played a role. So did a multitude of online voices in science, journalism, and the blogosphere.7 The blogosphere has been characterized as “a new kind of deliberative space that is both enlarging and constraining public discourse in unprecedented ways” and a place marked by “the lack of norms and the prevalence of incivility.”8 This analysis will consider these aspects of the blogosphere.
Context
In this analysis, the discourse on science, and science itself, is approached as “a
7 For this analysis, the author considered online content only. Some of this content replicated or was otherwise linked to print media content – for instance, in daily newspapers.
8 Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, Program on Science, Technology, & Society, “Unruly Democracy: Science Blogs and the Public Sphere,” Cambridge, MA, April 30-May 1, 2011, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/workshops/unrulydemocracy.html: “There are no well defined rules of entry, access, or conduct,” the organizers observed, and “the consequences…have been specially severe for scientific communication, which depends on high standards of truth-telling and civility for its progress. In turn, the erosion of scientific standards destabilizes the foundations of democratic deliberation. Can norms of discourse that would advance science and democracy be developed in the blogosphere? Can blogs induce deliberation or must they encourage fragmentation, extremism, and rage to the detriment of public reason? Is science helped or hurt by the new media? What particular distorting factors enter the picture as blogging becomes a business?”
4 historically situated and social activity…to be understood in relation to the contexts in which it occurs.”9 Meaning and power derive, as Bourdieu observed, from communicators and their social milieu, through discourse.10 Scientific authority, constructed as part of the broader enterprise of constructing “science,” is largely built through discourse. This authority is valuable social capital, conveying credibility and legitimacy.11
Standards for scientific credentials, as they represent authority, credibility and legitimacy, do not appear to be changing rapidly. A Ph.D. in an appropriate discipline from an accredited institution is still a basic requirement, and the more prestigious the degree-granting institution, the more valuable the credential. These and other “formal warrants of credibility – institutional affiliation or standing, the observance of explicitly framed methodological procedures, the display of expert consensus” – all come into play in constructing and maintaining authority.12
In the present, as in the past, not only all scientists but also “all claims have to win credibility,” as historian of science Steven Shapin has shown, “and credibility is the outcome of contingent social and cultural practices.”13 Science claims serve particular interests,14 and in controversies over science claims, “claims of expertise, integrity, and disinterestedness battle against accusations of incompetence,
9 S. Shapin, The scientific revolution, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 9.
10 P. Bourdieu, Language and symbolic power (J.B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond and M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
11 R. G. Walters, Scientific authority in twentieth century America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; L. Billings, Sex! Aliens! Harvard? Rhetorical Boundary-Work in the Media (A Case Study of the Role of Journalists in the Social Construction of Scientific Authority), [Bloomington, Ind.] Indiana University, 2005, https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/7093.
12 Walters, 1997, p. 30.
13 S. Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, p. 18.
14 W.E. Evans & S. Hornig-Priest, Science content and social context, Public Understanding of Science 4: 327-340, 1995. 5 dishonesty, and bias, in a war of dramatic narratives”15 waged by these interests.
The history of modern science is rich with such narratives. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, scientists argued over controversial claims in letters, at meetings, and occasionally in the public square.16 In the 20th century, scientific publishing and scientific conferences proliferated worldwide, broadening the community of practitioners and others participating in the discourse of science. The beginning of the 21st century brought a boom in new modes of communication – electronic, global, transparent (by design or otherwise), and available to anyone with access to a cell phone or computer, further expanding the discourse.
Journalistic and other types of non-scientific texts have been shown to play a role in the process of constructing scientific facts, and thus authority, through intertextual references to knowledge claims and counterclaims.17 What may be changing is the relative influence of journalistic and other non-scientific texts in this process. In journalism, elite print media – epitomized in the United States, for example, by the New York Times and Time magazine – are losing their leading position in science news.18 One no longer requires the traditional journalistic credentials – mainly, an affiliation with a so-called “mainstream” media outlet (newspaper, magazine, radio or television station or network) – to report on current events. Fewer and fewer media outlets employ full-time science reporters, and more and more science news arises out of social media such as blogs and Twitter. “The biggest growth industry [in mass media] is online,” U.S. science writer Cristine Russell has observed, and “online sites, blogs, and social media tools are becoming the twenty-first-century version of the science section.”19 ScienceOnline 2011, the
15 S. Hilgartner, Science on stage: expert advice as public drama, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 15.
16 See, for example, T. Brante, S. Fuller, & T. Lynch (Eds.), Controversial science: from content to contention, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993; T. F. Gieryn, Cultural boundaries of science: credibility on the line, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; H. T. Engelhardt, Jr., & A. L. Caplan (Eds.), Scientific controversies: case studies in the resolution and closure of disputes in science and technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
17 R. Hagendijk. & J. Meeus, Blind faith: fact, fiction and fraud in public controversy over science, Public Understanding of Science.2: 391-415, 1993.
18 “The State of the News Media 2011: An Annual Report on American Journalism,” Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Pew Research Center for People and the Press, http://stateofthemedia.org
19 C. Russell, “Covering controversial science: Improving reporting on science and public policy,” pp. 13-43 in D. Kennedy and G. Overholser (Eds.), 2010. 6 fifth in a series of annual meetings of science bloggers, drew close to 300 attendees who generated more than 1,000 tweets per day and more than 1,000 blog posts about the event.20 Some scientist-bloggers have reported that their blogging has helped them get tenure, engage in public outreach, and increase citations to their published research.21
The proliferation of social media, their widespread availability and ease of use, and continuing expansion of producers and consumers of social-media content constitute a phenomenon worthy of analysis. This analysis examines how the new media environment is changing relations – the balance of power, as it were – between science and scientists and journalism and journalists – and now, the blogosphere and bloggers.22
More than 30 years of communication research has explained how journalists decide what counts as news; what values, practices, and conventions are operative in journalism; and the range of influences on journalists and the content they produce.23 More recently, researchers have been tracking the burgeoning online news environment and the use of social media. Noting that “The Internet has already become a part of science communications, and yet there is no clear and systematic understanding of how such media as forums, blogs, wikis, and so on contribute to the debates about science,” Kouper24 has observed that scholars have just begun to examine the blogosphere. She has explored “current practices of science blogging and…the role of blogging in the promotion of more interactive
20 Http://scienceonline2011.com/blog/
21 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2 011_01_28/caredit.a1100007
22 Throughout this analysis, the author has attempted to note, when known, whether a blogger is also a journalist or a scientist. In the online news and information environment, these categorizations are not always clearly distinct.
23 See, for example: W. Donsbach, W. (2004), Psychology of news decisions: factors behind journalists’ professional behavior, Journalism 5: 131-157, 2004; H. Gans, Deciding what’s news: a study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time, New York: Vintage, 1979; P.J. Shoemaker, P. J. & S.D. Reese, Mediating the message: theories of influences on mass media content (2d ed.), White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996; B. Zelizer, “Journalists as interpretive communities,” pp. 401-419 in D. Berkowitz (Ed.), Social Meanings of News: A Text-Reader, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.
24 I. Kouper, Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities, Journal of Science Communication 9(1), March 2010.
7 forms of science communication” and found “no signs of emerging or stabilizing genre conventions.” She also found that “emotional and often insulting evaluations,” sarcasm, and mockery are common in these blogs.
Lievrouw25 has suggested that Web 2.0 is enabling a shift away from 20th-century “big science” marked by “the privileging of formal (document-producing) over informal (interpersonal) modes of scientific communication.” In the Web 2.0 environment, with its “new forms of online communication merging interaction and information access,” she has observed, “informality, reciprocation, and interaction have become defining modes” of the online discourse of science, including new, online forms of journal publishing. “Debate and interrogation are at the heart of scientific communication and publishing online,” she has noted. Given that a key question addressed in this analysis is how the rise of social media may be affecting the scientific practice of peer review, it is useful to consider Fitzpatrick’s26 views on peer review,” a practice that “has its deep origins in state censorship, as developed through the establishment and governance of state- supported academies.” In journal publishing, peer review originally “was intended to augment the authority of a journal’s editor rather than assure the quality of a journal’s products.” Over time, however, it evolved “into a means of creating authority in and of itself.”
While conventional peer review has played, and continues to play, an important role in the social construction of scientific authority, now “bloggers are decentralizing and even displacing the authority structures of traditional journalism,” Fitzpatrick has observed. Productive communication about scholarly endeavors online “requires the development of an open, community-oriented, post-publication system of peer-to-peer review.” How might the process of constructing scientific authority, credibility, and legitimacy be affected if, as Fitzpatrick has suggested, “peer review learned from social media and became peer-to-peer review?”27
25 L. Lievrouw, Social media and the production of knowledge: a return to little science? Social Epistemology 24(3): 219-237, 2010.
26 K. Fitzpatrick, Peer-to-peer review and the future of scholarly authority, Social Epistemology 24(3): 161-179, July-September 2010.
27 It is worth noting that, in 2006, Nature conducted “experiment” to gauge the science community’s receptivity toward an open, online, credited peer review process conducted in parallel with the conventional closed, offline, anonymous peer review. “Despite enthusiasm for the concept, open peer review was not widely popular, either among authors or by scientists invited to comment,” Nature reported following the conclusion of the experiment. (See: http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/index.html.) “We sent out a total of 1,369 papers for review during the trial period. The authors of 71 (or 5%) of these agreed to their papers being displayed for open comment. Of the displayed papers, 8
Objective The aim of this analysis is to explore whether and how the expanding online universe of social media may be changing the roles of journalists, scientists, bloggers and others in the discourse of science and, perhaps, the nature of the discourse itself. This analysis focuses in particular on peer review because of its central role in constructing authority, credibility, and legitimacy. The author hopes to offer some insights for scholars interested in exploring the ballooning “space” of the science blogosphere and for journalists, bloggers, scientists, and citizens who are navigating and otherwise using rapidly evolving and expanding social media and other online communication networks. While Kouper’s analysis28 focused on the role of the blogosphere in public engagement with science, this analysis is examining the blogosphere as a space that extends and democratizes the traditional scientific peer review process.
This analysis is part of the ongoing project to better understand how scientific authority is constructed, how it works and what it does, and what role journalists (now including bloggers) play in the process. The author is an advocate of transparency, openness, and participation in the enterprise of science, and this stance has influenced the choice of subject for this analysis.
Methods
This paper is a qualitative analysis, a naturalistic inquiry29 of sorts, informed by mass communication research and social studies of science. It proceeds on the assumption that social reality is constructed primarily through the symbolic action of communication, and it focuses on this action as it takes place in everyday life, represented in this case by the slice of social life known as the online news and information environment. It aims to shed light on how actors construct, maintain, repair and demolish social reality by means of communication, using names and labels, categories and classifications, definitions and descriptions to beget, befog,
33 received no comments, while 38 (54%) received a total of 92 technical comments. Of these comments, 49 were to 8 papers. The remaining 30 papers had comments evenly distributed. The most commented-on paper received 10 comments…. The trial received…an average of 5,600 html page views per week and about the same for RSS feeds. However, this reader interest did not convert into significant numbers of comments…. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments.”
28 See Note 27.
29 Y.S. Lincoln & E.G. Guba, Naturalistic inquiry, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.
9 and the boundaries of scientific authority, credibility, and legitimacy.30 It rests on the assumption that “the separation of science from other knowledge-producing activities is…a contextually contingent and interests-driven pragmatic accomplishment drawing selectively on inconsistent and ambiguous attributes.”31
Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s understandings of the creation, distribution, and exercise of power in specific cultural contexts inform this analysis. Foucault explored how power is constructed in everyday discourse, how power (and, thus, authority) arise out of this discourse, everywhere, from the top down and the bottom up.32 Bourdieu viewed the cultural space of science as a site of struggle to monopolize authority, to determine who has the right to speak for science,33 and he considered how words are employed in this struggle to construct or challenge authority. This analysis is an examination of the discourse about two particular struggles for scientific authority, credibility, and legitimacy. It is useful to examine discursive practices, as they are not simply ways of producing discourses, as Foucault observed: these practices define “a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories.”34 Such practices are tools of boundary- work, as it were. A productive approach to studying the social construction of scientific knowledge and scientific authority is “to listen and watch as science gets built.”35 The boundaries of science are maintained by actors who are perceived by legitimate scientists to be inside and outside the boundaries, and journalists, for example, can do boundary-work. Thus, the mass media (and, by extension, the online news and information environment), among other forums, provide “ripe spots for picking
30 P. Bourdieu, Language and symbolic power (J.B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond and M. Adamson, Trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
31 T.F. Gieryn, “Boundaries of science,” pp. 393-443 in S. Jasanoff, et al (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology studies, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995.
32 M. Foucault, Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977 (C. Gordon, Ed.), New York: Pantheon, 1980, p. 69.
33 Bourdieu, 1991.
34 Foucault, 1980, p. 199.
35 T.F. Gieryn & A.E. Figert, “Ingredients for a theory of science in society: O-rings, water, C-clamp, Richard Feynman, and the press,” pp. 67-97 in T. F. Gieryn & S.E. Cozzens (Eds.), Theories of science in society, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
10 juicy episodes of cultural cartography” 36: when journalists “use science to attach credibility to their stories, they are also reproducing the cultural meaning of scientists as the fount of authoritative knowledge about nature.”37
Research materials include a purposive sample of online texts. The author collected much online content in real time, as the discourse took place, and continued searching for further relevant content, using Google, Google News, and Google Blogs search tools. From hundreds of blog posts and online news items38, a purposive sample of content was selected. The aim of purposive sampling is not to eliminate deviant, extreme, or otherwise unusual examples but rather to “increase the scope or range of data exposed.”39 The subjects of this analysis generated a large volume of online content.40 Content was collected and reviewed from November 29, 2010, through July 30, 2011, and as the sample was assembled it also was continually adjusted and refocused. One criterion used to select this purposive sample was intertextuality – the cross-referencing of a certain subset of blog posts and online news stories. The more often a particular blog post was cited by others online, and vice versa, the more likely it would remain in the sample. The author also attempted to select a sample representing the range of the discourse about the case, from civil to uncivil and informed to uninformed. The sample provides a chronological narrative of the case, revealing the development of intertextual references. All together, the individual texts in my sample constitute a sort of “metatext” or metanarrative41 - a text made up of texts, an overarching story, or a story about a story. These texts are not simply replications of the same story for different publications. The texts are related; each text implicitly or explicitly is linked with previous texts, recapping past events, recycling expert sources, adding new
36 T.F. Gieryn, Cultural boundaries of science: credibility on the line, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 24.
37 Gieryn & Figert, 1990.
38 Many online news outlets generate content by means of conventional reporting and blogging. It is often difficult to distinguish a blog post from a news story online. Therefore, for the purposes of this analysis, both blog posts and online news stories are considered.
39 Lincoln & Guba, 1985, pp. 201-202.
40 For example, a Google advanced search conducted July 27, 2011, using the search terms “arsenic life” AND “Wolfe-Simon” AND “Science,” yielded 24,900 results, including blog posts, online news content dating from December 2, 2010. The author conducted online searches for content, using various search terms, at least once a week from December through July.
41 J.F. Lyotard, The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge (G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 11 information, and reflecting new perspectives. A scientific controversy can be analyzed as “a developing corpus of texts,” a metanarrative can be defined as “the texts that make up the textual corpus of the controversy” and the product of “the ways in which texts refer to other texts in establishing facts, identifies of actors and accounts” (p. 391).42
Given its focus on cultural authority, this study draws on the literature and employs some of the approaches of cultural studies, with its critical, post-positivistic focus on the role of the mass media in social life and power relations in communications and society.43 The case of arsenic-life: firestorm in the blogosphere?
On December 2, 2010, leading journal Science published a paper online coauthored by 12 scientists reporting they had found and cultured a microbe that, in the laboratory, could substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its major macromolecules, including DNA.44 If verified, this finding would indicate that “life” might not be exactly “as we know it.” The Internet teemed with speculation about this paper’s content for days before its publication. Comments from journalists, bloggers, scientists, and others online ranged from guesswork based on knowledge of the authors’ research expertise and past publications to assertions that the researchers had found evidence of extraterrestrial life on Earth, or elsewhere. Though it is difficult to determine precisely why this paper generated so much buzz or when the buzz began, the following factors were likely contributors.
The findings challenged the standard concept of life in which arsenic is toxic and phosphorus is required. The paper’s lead author, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, was a relative newcomer to science, under 35, and supported by a postdoctoral research grant from NASA. Wolfe-Simon was conducting her research in collaboration with scientists supported by NASA’s astrobiology program, which funds research into the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. She was testing the hypothesis that life as we know it might be able to substitute arsenic for phosphorus in conditions where phosphorus might be scarce. She and her coauthors and mentors Ariel Anbar and Paul Davies had been talking publicly about the idea of
42 Hagendijk & Meeus, 1993.
43 J. Carey, The origins of the radical discourse on cultural studies in the United States, Journal of Communication, 33(3): 311-313, 1983.
44 Felisa Wolfe-Simon, Jodi Switzer Blum, Thomas R. Kulp, Gwyneth W. Gordon, Shelley E. Hoeft, Jennifer Pett-Ridge, John F. Stolz, Samuel M. Webb, Peter K. Weber, Paul C. W. Davies, Ariel D. Anbar, and Ronald S. Oremland, “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus,” Science, 3 June 2011: 1163-1166. Published online 2 December 2010.
12 arsenic-life since at least 2006.45 In 2009, Anbar, Davies, and Wolfe-Simon published a thesis paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology describing their arsenic- life hypothesis. Also in 2009, NASA-sponsored Astrobiology Magazine46 reported on Wolfe-Simon’s arsenic-life research. That story made some interesting claims: “Just to be clear: finding an organism that didn’t need phosphorus, that used arsenic instead, would be one of the most significant scientific discoveries of all time. It would mean that Mono Lake was home to a form of life biologically distinct from all other known life on Earth. It would strongly suggest that life got started on our planet not once, but at least twice, that the origin of life on Earth was not a freak accident requiring highly specialized circumstances, but a relatively commonplace event. And that in turn would strengthen the argument that life is likely to be present on other worlds as well.” (This article did not prompt any public outcry.)
If true, the claims made in the Science paper might lead scientists to broaden their thinking about necessary conditions for habitability in terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments. Thus, the manager of NASA’s astrobiology program47 found the paper relevant to ongoing efforts to find evidence of extraterrestrial life.48 When notified that Science had accepted the paper for publication, she decided it was worth publicizing. On November 28, Science distributed information to the media on the arsenic-life paper, including the paper itself, embargoed until 2 pm Eastern Time December 2.49 On November 29, NASA issued a media advisory about
45 Anbar and Davies are on the faculty of Arizona State University (ASU). Anbar is principal investigator for an astrobiology research team funded by NASA’s astrobiology program. (See: http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/nai/teams/can5/asu/). Davies is director of ASU’s BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. (See: http://beyond.asu.edu/drupal/.) In December 2006, the BEYOND Center held a workshop, “Trees or Forest? Searching for Alternative Forms of Life on Earth,” at which the idea of life substituting arsenic for phosphorus was discussed. Workshop participants included Anbar, Davies, Richard Hoover, and Felisa Wolfe-Simon (then affiliated with ASU). See: http://beyond.asu.edu/drupal/workshops/2006/tree-or-forest-searching- alternative-forms-life-earth
46 H. Bortman, “Searching for alien life, on Earth,” October 5, 2009, http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_expedition&task=detail&id=3259 &type=story
47 Mary Voytek, Senior Scientist for Astrobiology. See: http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/directory/profile/4886/mary/voytek/
48 Personal communications with Wolfe-Simon and Mary Voytek.
49 Science, a weekly journal, issues weekly alerts to the media on Sundays, by means of its EurekAlert science news service (http://www.eurekalert.org/), about selected 13 a December 2 press conference scheduled to report on the paper, with no details about the paper itself, in keeping with the journal’s embargo policy. The ease, openness, and immediacy of electronic communication coupled with the “pack journalism” effect50 prompted a torrent of commentary about this paper, both before and after it was published. Blog posts about the paper spiked following distribution of the media advisory, with bloggers speculating about its contents – on their own blogs, others’ blogs, and Twitter.
On November 29, independent blogger Jason Kottke posted an item commenting on NASA’s advisory, asking “Has NASA discovered extraterrestrial life?”51 He guessed that NASA would be announcing it had “discovered arsenic on Titan and maybe even detected chemical evidence of bacteria utilizing it for photosynthesis (by following the elements). Or something like that.” He updated his post on Nov. 30 in response to a tweet that day by journalist/blogger Alexis Madrigal52 stating: “I'm sad to quell some of the @kottke-induced excitement about possible extraterrestrial life. I've seen the Science paper. It's not that.” Nonetheless, Kottke’s post was cited repeatedly by other bloggers and tweeters.
Columbia Journalism Review blogger Curtis Brainard posted on December 1 that NASA’s advisory had led to “wild speculation about alien discovery. Over the last two days, bloggers at a few of the country’s top news outlets have engaged in wild and wholly unsubstantiated speculation about the discovery of alien life. The runaway blogging stems from a cryptic press release issued by NASA on Monday, which said that the agency would be holding a news conference at 2 p.m. on Thursday ‘to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life’…. [I]t is important to note straightaway that they have done no such thing. Moreover, the episode highlights the pitfall of jumping to conclusions in the fast-paced, modern media.”53
On his blog “The Loom,” Carl Zimmer, a well-known science writer54, reported
papers in its upcoming issue, published online on Thursdays and distributed in print on Fridays.
50 See journalist Tim Porter’s commentary on pack journalism: http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000433.html
52 Madrigal, formerly a blogger for Wired Science, is a senior editor with the Atlantic Monthly: http://www.theatlantic.com/alexis-madrigal/. He is well-known in the new-media community: http://www.leighbureau.com/speaker.asp?id=471.
53 http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/close_encounters_of_the_media.php
54 See: http://www.carlzimmer.com/
14
December 2: “Rumors have been swirling this week about a press conference NASA is starting right now. Some people have speculated that they’re going to announce evidence for life on another planet. Well, not quite. Scientists have found a form of life [on Earth] that they claim bends the rules for life as we know it…. If Wolfe-Simon can satisfy the critics,” he concluded, “this will be research to watch. Such a discovery would indeed be huge news–although not as huge as a similar discovery on another planet.”55 Coverage of the arsenic-life paper was largely straightforward from December 2-4, reporting on its contents, the proceedings of the press conference, and other scientists’ skeptical views. Nature reported December 2 that an “arsenic-eating microbe may redefine chemistry of life. A bacterium found in the arsenic-filled waters of a Californian lake is poised to overturn scientists' understanding of the biochemistry of living organisms.”56 ABC News reported online December 2: “Life in space? Not quite. But to scientists in the arcane field of astrobiology, it's still pretty cool.”57 This story asked, “If they didn't find alien life, why was the blogosphere so wildly abuzz about it?” and cited Kottke’s November 29 blog post, NASA’s media advisory, and Science’s embargo policy as contributing factors. The New York Times reported December 3: “Microbe Finds Arsenic Tasty; Redefines Life. Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus — one of six elements considered essential for life — opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about.”58 The Washington Post followed suit, noting for its readers, “News of the discovery caused a scientific commotion this week, including calls to NASA from the White House.”59
While criticisms of the paper were already circulating on the Web, the tone of online discourse about it shifted sharply on December 4 with a post by University of British Columbia biologist Rosemary (Rosie) Redfield, on her blog “RRResearch.” The stated
55 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/12/02/of-arsenic-and-aliens/
56 A. Katsnelson, “Arsenic-eating microbe may redefine chemistry of life,” Nature, published online Dec. 2, 2010:, http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101202/full/news.2010.645.html
57 N. Potter, “NASA: Life in Space? Not Quite, but Life that Thrives on Arsenic,” December 2, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/life-space-life-lives-off- arsenic/story?id=12291373
58http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/science/03arsenic.html?scp=1&sq=Denni s+Overbye+arsenic+life&st=nyt
59 M. Kaufman, “Life on Earth, with a little arsenic,” Washington Post, December 3, 2010, p. A1.
15 purpose of this blog is to document the work of Redfield’s lab – which it apparently did, until her 2,000-word-plus “detailed review” of the arsenic-life paper.60 She wrote: “NASA's shameful analysis of the alleged bacteria in the Mars meteorite made me very suspicious of their microbiology, an attitude that's only strengthened by my reading of this paper…it doesn't present ANY convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA (or any other biological molecule)…. Bottom line: Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information…. I don't know whether the authors are just bad scientists or whether they're unscrupulously pushing NASA's 'There's life in outer space!' agenda. I hesitate to blame the reviewers, as their objections are likely to have been overruled by Science's editors in their eagerness to score such a high-impact publication.”61 On December 5, doctoral student Alex Bradley posted on the science blog “We, Beasties”: “There's been a lot of hype around the news of…the microbe claimed to substitute arsenate for phosphate in its DNA. In the midst of all the excitement, one thing has been overlooked: The claim is almost certainly wrong.”62 On December 6, U.S. Geological Survey researcher Ronald Oremland, an expert on arsenic in the environment and a coauthor of the arsenic-life paper, gave a seminar at NASA on his NASA-sponsored research into arsenic and microbial life.63 During the seminar Oremland admitted he was not familiar with the world of Web 2.0 and social media and consequently was wary of plunging into it. He reiterated this sentiment at a media briefing later in December.64 Also on December 6, biochemist-
60 http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html
61 Redfield continued: “The authors misleadingly claim that the cells didn't grow at all with no supplements…. Is this a shabby trick…?... The authors never calculated…. The authors use very indirect evidence to argue that the distribution of arsenic mirrors that expected for phosphate, but this argument depends on so many assumptions that it should be ignored…. Might they have not presented assays using properly purified (washed) DNA because these turned out to not have any arsenic? Am I just paranoid?...”
62 “Arsenate-based DNA: a big idea with big holes,” http://scienceblogs.com/webeasties/2010/12/guest_post_arsenate-based_dna.php
63 NASA senior scientist for astrobiology Mary Voytek had scheduled Oremland’s talk for December 6 before the arsenic-life press conference was scheduled for December 2. After the press conference, Voytek arranged for Oremland’s seminar to be webcasted and also broadcasted on NASA TV.
64 Oremland participated in a panel discussion with three journalists about media coverage of the arsenic-life paper, at the 2010 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. In a December 13 media advisory, AGU advised: “The schedule of Fall Meeting press conferences has been updated to reflect the addition of a session for media and press officers called “Reporting on Cutting-Edge Science: The 16 blogger Larry Moran posted about how the case of the arsenic-life paper was highlighting the value of blogs in the discourse of science: Science blogs do at least one thing that's new—they provide instant commentary on science news and that helps to serve as authoritative fact-checking. Science blogs monitor science journalism…. This role has been illustrated…as we monitor the response to the NASA hype over [arsenic life]. The weaknesses of the Science paper are now well- known thanks to many science bloggers. In the past, this kind of analysis would have had to wait for the publication of an appropriate critique in a scientific journal and that was very unlikely to happen for a number of very good reasons. Thus, in the past shoddy, over-hyped work got a free pass and science journalists who fell for the hype never even realized that they had been duped.65 On December 7, Carl Zimmer, who on December 4 had posted about the arsenic-life paper on his own blog, wrote about Redfield’s and other scientists’ criticisms of the paper for the online magazine Slate: “ ‘This Paper Should Not Have Been Published’: Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life.66 On Slate, Zimmer essentially endorsed Redfield’s critique and quoted other scientist-critics as well.
Postdoctoral geologist Chris Rowan blogged on December 767: “Hey NASA, this is what peer review looks like.” Any new research that draws media attention is bound to draw criticism, and more so if it is published in Nature or Science, he noted. “When scientists pick apart others’ research that’s what I consider to be real peer review. The pre-publication stuff is just a quality filter…and an imperfect filter at
Intriguing Case of 'Arsenic and Odd Life',” which will be held Thursday [December 13].” The author had proposed this session to AGU public affairs officer Peter Weiss and observed it via live Webcast.
65 http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2010/12/value-of-blogs.html: “Many people have questioned the significance of blogs and bloggers. Some think that science blogs have no useful purpose and that they are undermining the peer review process of publication in scientific journals. Science journalists resent the fact that amateur writers can throw up something on a blog and claim that it's contributing to science education….”
66 http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/. The headline for this story is a quote from a scientist, as indicated in the body of the story: “’This paper should not have been published,’ said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.”
67 “Highly Allochthonous Highway: News and commentary from the world of Geology & Earth Science, on All-Geo, “The best of Geology and Earth Science on the web”: http://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2010/12/hey-nasa-this-is-what- peer-review-actually-looks-like/ 17 that…. it is hardly news that other experts in the field are skeptical of the claims in [the arsenic-life] paper. They’re scientists. This is what scientists do…. the real issue here: in this new media world of blogs and twitter streams, it’s much harder to control a story, because other scientists now have the tools to make their criticism just as public as your press releases…it’s great that Rosie Redfield’s critique, amongst others’, is being brought to the public attention…it is only by showing people what a real scientific debate looks like, and how congenitally argumentative scientists are as a tribe, that the climate change/evolution/vaccine ‘debates’ will be shown up for the manipulative shams they are.” That same day scientist-blogger Bora Zivkovic posted what he called an “Arsenic bacteria link-dump.”68 Computational biologist-blogger Grant Jacobs also posted: “NASA: science shouldn’t be debated in media and blogs?”69 Jacobs quoted a tweet by a well-known science blogger (who was retweeting a message from another science blogger): “A few minutes ago Ed Yong70 tweeted: NASA deems it inappropriate “to debate the science using the media and bloggers” http://t.co/a3VFOa2 But runaway hype okay? HT @david_dobbs.”71 Jacobs continued, “In the end it will be the formal articles that discuss that issue that will stand for the record, but you can’t realistically ask that scientists and science bloggers not explore the issues in public forums. There is nothing new going on in scientists writing on blogs…. There might be something new in journalists tapping into this writing…?” Meanwhile, Wolfe-Simon and NASA responded to requests for comment on other scientists’ questions and criticisms by declaring the blogosphere an inappropriate forum for scientific peer review and declining to respond in that forum. Not only was their declaration to no avail, as the public onslaught continued, but also it provoked further criticism for dismissing bloggers as legitimate commentators.
On December 8, Zimmer posted on his blog: “A lot of people are interested in my Slate story yesterday on the arsenic aliens. It’s still the most-read story of the site at the moment, Slashdot and others have linked to it, and I’m doing some more radio and maybe other media…. I think that what has gotten so much attention to the
68 See: http://blog.coturnix.org/2010/12/07/arsenic-bacteria-link-dump/. Zivkovic is a prolific blogger, an organizer of the annual ScienceOnline conferences, and blogs editor for Scientific American.
69 “Code for Life: Biology, science communication & policy,” http://sciblogs.co.nz/code-for-life/2010/12/07/nasa-science-shouldn’t-be- debated-in-media-and-blogs/
70 See: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/
71 David Dobbs blogs for Wired Science. See: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/neuronculture/
18 story is just how many scientists had such critical things to say.”72 Zimmer cited, among other sources, Alex Bradley’s December 5 blog post. Citing Zimmer and other bloggers, science blogger Martin Robbins declared, “NASA’s arsenic debacle tells us a lot about what’s wrong about the relationship between science, peer review, and the media.” 73 Robbins continued: “While newspapers ran away with the story, it was left to bloggers like Ed Yong, Carl Zimmer…and Phil Plait to put things into perspective…. It would be daft to talk about blogs taking over peer review, but clearly having lots of scientists discussing papers through social networks can achieve more than the current system, at least some of the time.”
Nature reported online December 9, “Days after an announcement that a strain of bacteria can apparently use arsenic in place of phosphorous to build its DNA and other biomolecules — an ability unknown in any other organism — some scientists are questioning the finding and taking issue with how it was communicated to non- specialists.”74 ABC News reported online December 10 that a week after the arsenic- life announcement, “the blogosphere has quieted down…but some biologists still are on fire.” This story focused on Redfield’s critique.75 The New York Times followed up December 13: “Poisoned Debate Encircles a Microbe Study’s Result: The announcement that NASA experimenters had found a bacterium that seems to be able to subsist on arsenic in place of phosphorus…set off a cascading storm of
72 “Of arsenic and aliens: what the critics said,” The Loom, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/12/08/of-arsenic-and-aliens- what-the-critics-said/
73 “The Lay Scientist,” December 8, 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay- scientist/2010/dec/08/2
74 A. Katsnelson, “Microbe gets toxic response: researchers question the science behind last week’s revelation of arsenic-based life,” Nature, published online December 7, 2010, http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101207/full/468741a.html
75 On December 10, Redfield blogged about an apology she had sent to Wolfe-Simon: “I'm emailing you to apologize for quotes from me that have just appeared on the ABC News website. I wasn't misquoted, but some of the things I said in a phone interview yesterday morning came across more harshly than I had intended. I told the interviewer that, even though I think your conclusions were wrong, I sympathize with the difficult position you're in (I've spent about 20 years championing a hypothesis that almost everyone thinks is wrong). I also said that what matters in science isn't whether we make mistakes (we all do) but how we deal with them, and that I think you're handling the situation well.” See: http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/apologetic-email.html
19 criticism on the Internet, first about alleged errors and sloppiness in the paper published in Science by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues, and then about their and NASA’s refusal to address the criticisms. The result has been a stormy brew of debate about the role of peer review, bloggers and the reliability of NASA….”76
On December 11, Redfield blogged about “how to harness distributed discussion of research papers.” 77 Before the advent of the Internet, she wrote: Researchers did the research, wrote the paper, submitted it to peer review, made changes, and published it…. Now that we're all on line, published papers are…being discussed more publicly, in blogs and other places. Such discussions are extraordinarily valuable for the progress of science - they're written public evaluations, drawn from a wide range of expertise, and usually greatly enriched by comments from and links other researchers. But these pages are all over the place, and finding them requires a lot of active searching. The Research Blogging site78 is helping…by aggregating blog posts that discuss individual research papers. But they can only link to posts that actively insert their code, and so miss quite a lot of the public commentary…. A few forward-thinking online journals…provide their own Comments thread for each paper, so other researchers can provide informal but public feedback. But the researchers don't use these, saying that they don't feel comfortable doing this publicly, or that they don't like the bother of having to register and log on. I know that's true for me, thought I don't know why - I'll happily blog about a paper I've read, but I almost never post comments on its official Comments page.
Scientist-blogger Jeffrey Toney posted December 16 that the arsenic-life “affair may well become a case study not only for students studying journalism but for science students as example of the communication gap between scientists and the news media.”79 On December 16 and 17, Redfield posted further criticisms of the arsenic-
76http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/science/14arsenic.html?scp=2&sq=Denni s+Overbye+arsenic+life&st=nyt
77 Http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-harness-distributed- discussion.html. In this post Redfield elaborated on “on a suggestion I saw a few days ago, in an article discussing the role of post-publication commentary in science. (And yes, I'm searching for the source of this idea - if any reader remembers whose it was, please point me to it.)”
78 Http://researchblogging.org/static/index/page/about
79 “Scientists and the news media: arsenic-based life forms a case study?”, December 16, 2010, “Dean’s Corner: Translating the Endless Wonderment of Science, 20 life paper and of Wolfe-Simon’s preliminary response to questions and criticisms about it.80 The Washington Post followed up December 17 on the online discourse about the paper, also reporting on “a panel discussion at a San Francisco science conference, convened specifically to discuss the arsenic research and the online response.”81 According to the Post, study coauthor Ronald Oremland…defended his silence [in the online discourse] as an integral part of the tried-and-true scientific research process.”82 By the end of December, the online discourse about the arsenic-life paper – especially Redfield’s blog-critique, Zimmer’s reinforcement of that critique on Slate, and the paper authors’ and NASA’s refusal to engage in the discourse – had worked together to construct a set of enduring social “facts”: the paper was wrong, the research was shoddy, and NASA hyped the results.
In a March 18, 2011, blog post83, evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen wrote about a http://scienceblogs.com/deanscorner/2010/12/scientists_and_the_news_media.ph p
80 “Comments on Dr. Wolfe-Simon's Response: Preliminary Response to Questions Concerning the Science Article (from F. Wolfe-Simon, Dec. 16, 2010), http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/text.html; http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/yet-another-reason-why-wolfe- simon.html: “Experimental results need to be evaluated from two perspectives, the quality of the data and the probability of the explanation. I and many others have critiqued the Wolfe-Simon results based on the poor quality of the data, and chemists have critiqued them based on the predicted instability of arsenic bonds in a DNA backbone. But I don't think anyone has spelled out the improbability from an evolutionary perspective.” Wolfe-Simon’s preliminary response was posted on her Web site, www.ironlisa.com, which at the time this analysis was being completed was “down for maintenance.”
81 Oremland participated along with three journalists in a December 13 panel discussion convened at the American Geophysical Union’s 20-10 fall meeting to discuss media coverage of the arsenic-life paper. See: http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2010/2010-44.shtml. The author proposed this session to AGU public affairs officer Peter Weiss and observed it via live Webcast. It was organized by AGU in consultation with NASA.
82 M. Kaufman, “Study on arsenic-based life takes a beating on the Web,” Washington Post, December 17, 2010, A10.
83 M. Eisen, Felisa-Wolfe Simon (of arsenic infamy) is no more convincing in person than in print, March 18, 2011, http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=346. Eisen’s blog is called “It is NOT junk: a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things.” 21 seminar Wolfe-Simon had given on his campus:
I went because, as bad as I thought her paper was, as poorly as I thought she handled concerns expressed about the work, and as cringe-worthy was her performance in the NASA press conference, I understand that sometimes people get caught up in things that are out of their control, and I hoped that in a more comfortable setting she might reveal a different side…. I held out hope that the criticism of the paper would have led to a more sober assessment of her data. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The most highly-criticized aspects of the paper remained in her talk – with little change or explanation…. The clear sense I got from listening to her talk is that she is 100% sure that GFAJ-1 has arsenic in its DNA, and since she does not feel the need to prove it to herself, she feels only mildly compelled to prove it to others. Of course she could be right – as much as her poorly controlled experiments fail to demonstrate that arsenic is incorporated into DNA, they don’t disprove it either…. The acid test of a scientist is how they respond when their work is criticized…the worst response is to view criticism as a kind of virtue. And there were signs in Wolfe-Simon’s talk that she is beginning to relish the role of the iconoclast…. And that criticism of her work is not an effort to get at the truth but a conspiracy to suppress it.
On May 1, Redfield posted on her blog84:
The PaleBlue astrobiology blog85 has a new post titled High Impact Science in a Hyperactive Media Environment, discussing lessons to be learned about how to discuss adaptations that are needed to effectively communicate high-profile science in the current media environment. In general I agree with the points being made. But I…disagree with how a quote from my original post about the Wolfe-Simon paper is described…. Here's what I wrote: ‘I don’t know whether the authors are just bad scientists or whether they’re unscrupulously pushing NASA’s ‘There’s life in outer space!’ agenda. I hesitate to blame the reviewers, as their objections are likely to have been overruled by Science’s editors in their eagerness to score such a high- impact publication.’ The author of the blog then says: This paragraph is both
84 http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html
85 http://paleblueblog.org. This blog was started by ASU astrobiologist Ariel Anbar (a coauthor on the arsenic-life paper) and astrobiology postdoctoral researchers Shawn Goldman and Betul Arslan. It was established in part in response to what its creators perceived as misconceptions about the science of astrobiology and, more specifically, the arsenic-life paper (personal communication with Shawn Goldman).
22 inaccurate and unfounded. The author of this blog post (Dr. Rosie Redfield) followed a detailed technical critique with a slate of personal attacks, snark, and assumptions as to the motivations of the authors, NASA, and Science’s editors. I've seen complaints about these two sentences elsewhere, most recently here, and I don't think they're valid. Here's the comment I just posted on the PaleBlue blog: Despite all the opprobrium attracted by those two sentences in my original post, I still think they nicely distribute the responsibility for what everyone agrees was a truly terrible paper. Producing some bad science does not automatically make one a bad scientist, but the authors' continuing refusal to admit they made any mistakes is not a good sign. NASA's financial support for the work certainly played a role, as probably did the publicity they eagerly provided. I doubt that the paper would have been accepted if all the reviewers had identified the obvious errors, and Science's editors were certainly complicit in the decision to publish.
In June, Science published eight “technical comments” on the arsenic-life paper, along with a response from the authors of the paper and an editor’s note: “Our procedures for Technical comments and Responses are such that the original authors are given the last word, and we recognize that some issues remain unresolved…. [T]he discussion published today is only a step in a much longer process.”86 The publication of these comments prompted another flurry of reporting and blogging. The dialogue will no doubt continue.
Results
The case examined herein involves controversial claims about astrobiology research. The contreoversial paper in this case was published in a leading science journal, a gatekeeper of the boundaries of scientific authority, credibility, and legitimacy. The lead author of the Science paper was a young, female, postdoctoral researcher with a reputation for challenging the conventional wisdom in science. Felisa Wolfe-Simon was Ph.D. natural scientist whose research was funded by NASA’s astrobiology program, and her coauthors included senior members of the astrobiology community (Anbar, Davies, Oremland). While her critics questioned her methods and interpretations, they did not question her credentials.
About the arsenic-life paper, journalists, bloggers, and scientists together succeeded in establishing as social “facts” that it should not have been published, that the research reported in it was shoddy, and that NASA had “hyped” the paper and misled the media by using the term “extraterrestrial life” in a media advisory about the paper.87, 88 Nonetheless, the online discourse about it continues, as Redfield and
86 Science 332:1149, 3 June 2011.
87 It is interesting to note that on April 27, 2010, NASA issued a media advisory, “NASA Announces Wednesday Media Teleconference About Search For Extraterrestrial Life: NASA will hold a news media teleconference at 1:30 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, April 28, to discuss the status of agency-sponsored astrobiology 23 other scientists continue to test and contest its claims.
This analysis affirms Lievrouw’s observations 89 that Web 2.0 is facilitating the development of new, online forms of scientific discourse, peer review, and publishing. They affirm her assertion that “debate and interrogation are at the heart of scientific communication and publishing online.” They also confirm that journalistic and other types of non-scientific texts can play a role in the process of constructing scientific facts, and thus scientific authority, through intertextual references to knowledge claims and counterclaims.90
It also affirms Kouper’s findings about the science blogosphere – a lack of genre conventions and a prevalence of sarcasm, mockery, and insults. This analysis revealed what Kouper also saw: “Bloggers alternate explanations and critical commentary with quick personal opinions, re-posting of content from news sources and other blogs, and humorous and sarcastic remarks. Readers respond with similar actions and in addition to topic developments offer quick personal judgments, insulting and sarcastic remarks, and personal details.”91 At the same time, this analysis highlights the need for scholars to think about new methods analyzing Web content.92
research, including the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life and the study of how life began on Earth. Topics also will include the quest for evidence of life on Mars….”87 No online buzz or public outcry preceded or followed this news event. Media coverage was straightforward. The author played a role in organizing this event.
88 Scientist-blogger Bora Zivkovic wrote in a June 28, 2011, email to the author: “The term #arseniclife is now a shorthand for ‘dinosaur, curmudgeonly, outdated PR doing everything wrong in pushing bad research’ – and it was used as an example of inept PR at a number of conferences to date, including ScienceOnline2011, World Science Festival 2011, currently ongoing World Congress of Science Journalists, etc.”
89 L. Lievrouw, Social media and the production of knowledge: a return to little science? Social Epistemology 24(3): 219-237, 2010.
90 See Note 18.
91 I. Kouper, Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities, Journal of Science Communication 9(1), March 2010.
92 See, for example: S. Herring, “Web content analysis: expanding the paradigm,” pp. 233-249, in H. Hunsinger et al (Eds.), International Handbook of Internet Research, New York: Spring, 2009; U.H. Meinhof & J. Smith (Eds.), Intertextuality and the Media, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
24
This analysis yields some observations that are relevant to the study and practice of science communication:
The concept of “elite media” is changing, as conventional print and broadcast media are yielding their news-agenda-setting positions to online reporters and bloggers. With fewer full-time science writers covering more, and more complex, science news, fact checking may be falling by the wayside in the world of online news and information, where speed is of the essence. Non-experts, such as blogger Jason Kottke, can affect the public discourse about science. The media have long been fond of reporting on the media, and in these cases a number of conventional and new-media outlets reported on media coverage of these stories. Resistance to the social reality of online, open science commentary and review seems futile, as evidenced by the reaction of bloggers when NASA’s public affairs office and the lead author of the arsenic-life paper dismissed the blogosphere as a legitimate space for credible, authoritative peer review.
Discussion and conclusions
More than a half century of social studies of science has shown how Kuhn’s “normal science”93 is messy and subjective.94 Rather than a timeless search for objective “truth,” science is, as Carey95 explained, “merely part of the conversation of our culture…a pattern of discourse adopted for various historical reasons for the achievement of objective truth, where objective truth is no more and no less than the best idea we currently have about how to explain what is going on.” Yet many scientists – and journalists, too – continue to hew to the conventional conception of “science,” as articulated by Merton96 – a collegial and objective enterprise operating
93 T. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
94 See, for example: H.M. Collins & T.J. Pinch, The golem: what everyone should know about science, Cambridge [England], New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Gieryn, 1999, A. Ross (Ed.), Science wars, Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 1996; Shapin, 2010.
95 J. Carey, Communication as culture: essays on media and society, New York: Routledge, 1992 version, 1988, p. 80.
96 R. K. Merton, On social structure and science (P. Sztompka, Ed.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
25 according to widely accepted norms of methodology, popularization, and publicity – and some invoked these norms in the discourse considered herein. At the same time this analysis revealed a vigorous discussion about the norms of conventional scientific peer review, the ways in which Web 2.0 could improve on them, and the right of bloggers and journalists to participate in a more open peer- review process online. As one scientist-blogger noted, in commenting on the arsenic-life case97: “The blogs are paying attention…[they] are a public microphone, and people are listening.” The warning to scientists, “’Don’t diss the media’ now includes ‘don’t diss the blogs.’” A coauthor of the arsenic-life paper blogged98: “the final version of the arsenic paper has appeared online, along with a slew of technical comments and responses…I’d like to make a heartfelt request of the emerging PaleBlueBlog community: Let’s keep our discussions constructive.”
Many scientists have plunged into the Web 2.0 environment, and many more undoubtedly will follow. The science community might do well to better understand how the adoption of new modes of communication might change the way scientists do science and the way scientists and others define scientific authority, credibility, and legitimacy.99 As this analysis has shown, social media are changing the
97 S. Goldman, High-impact science in a hyperactive media environment, Pale Blue Blog, May 2011, http://paleblueblog.org/post/5909713352/high-impact-science- in-a-hyperactive-media-environment
98 A. Anbar, Assessing arsenic (and beyond): rules for the road, Pale Blue Blog, June 2011, http://paleblueblog.org/post/6072014414/assessing-arsenic-and-beyond- rules-for-the-road: “That doesn’t mean holding back on critiques of technical aspects of the arsenic paper or any other, or of making critical comments about “meta” aspects of a science story, such as public relations hooplah…. The editors of this blog firmly believe that disagreement and debate are essential to progress in science. However, it does mean thinking twice before publicly casting aspersions on the characters and motives of authors, reviewers, editors, funding agencies, or research communities. Sure, it is natural for us as human beings to engage in gossipy, snarky speculation. But I don’t see how it is helpful to air such thoughts to the world. On the flip side, doing so is harmful in many ways: ◦ It gives “open science” and blogging a bad name among the vast majority of scholars who have no appetite for this sort of public exchange; ◦ It sends people into a defensive crouch that inhibits rather than encourages pursuit of truth; ◦ It coarsens a culture that is already too driven by emotion-laden shout-fests that tear people down, when what we need are more constructive debates that inspire people to excel.”
99 It is interesting to note that while Nature, a commercial publication, has paid quite a bit of attention to Web 2.0 – for instance, through its 2006 experiment with online, 26 discourse of science by broadening participation in the discourse and democratizing the dialogue. Some members of the science community appear prepared to function in this new environment. Others do not. Whether open, pre- or post-publication, online peer review will ultimately acquire the same credibility, authority, and legitimacy as the traditional, closed, anonymous system of peer review remains to be seen, as such a change would require the displacement a century-old practice that is tightly controlled and linked to subscription-based and for-profit publishing with a new practice that, at present, is virtually uncontrolled, free, and open to anyone who wants to weigh in. Incivility and critique without analysis may become accepted conventions in science blogging, as they appear to be widely accepted in the broader cultural environment. It is too early to tell whether science blogging will change the norms of the discourse of science, or vice versa. Further study of open, online peer review will be useful, toward determining whether and how it may affect traditional peer review and whether and how it develops standard practices and conventions. Both of the cases considered herein warrant more in-depth analysis than this study provides. Approaching this case as social studies of science could reveal much about the complex actor-networks at play. Fioravanti and Velho100 have suggested that science journalists could improve their reporting by employing Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an approach to examining the construction of scientific facts. Science journalism’s routine practice of basing science reporting on journal publications has “strengthened the authority of scientists and widened the gap between scientists and readers,” they observed. Such an approach “would widen the focus of science stories, by referencing to other social actors, considering their motivation, interests and conflicts.” In both of the cases considered herein, further analysis employing ANT could reveal much about the motivations, interests, and conflicts of the journalists, bloggers, and many other actors involved.
While Redfield and others attempt to replicate the results reported in Science, the dialogue about the arsenic-life paper continues. Journalists, bloggers, and scientists
open peer review (see Note xx) – Science, published by a large and influential scientific society, has not. A Nature editorial about the arsenic-life paper (468: 867, 16 December 2011) declared, “Response required: Blogs and other online communities can provide valuable feedback on newly published research. Scientists need to adjust their mindsets to embrace and respond to these new forums for debate.” A Nature news article (A. Mandavilli, 469: 286-287, 20 January 2011) reported on “Trial by Twitter: Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react.”
100 C. Fioravanti & L. Velho, Let’s follow the actors! Does Actor-Network Theory have anything to contribute to science journalism? Journal of Science Communication 9 (4), December 2010. 27 with expertise in other fields will continue to pass judgment on the quality and importance of the research results reported by Wolfe-Simon et al. It remains to be seen whether the expansion of social media and the inclusion of broader audiences in open, public, non-refereed peer review of science will improve, degrade, or have no effect on scientific knowledge production, communication with non-expert audiences about science, or public understanding of or engagement with science. The author hopes other science communication researchers will deem these questions worth exploring.
Democracy is messy, and thus the democratization of scientific peer review is, and will be, messy. Thanks in part to the rise of social media and expanding access to the Internet, the cultural environment for science is trending toward greater transparency, openness, and participation. The author hopes that this trend continues and that scientists, journalists, bloggers, and science communication researchers can learn to navigate productively through the mess.
About the author:
Linda Billings (Ph.D., mass communication, Indiana University) is a research professor at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., and a Principal Investigator with NASA’s astrobiology program, doing communication research. Among her research interests are the social construction of scientific authority, the rhetoric of science, and science policy and politics. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009. This analysis was supported by NASA grant NNX09AI58A.