Felisa Wolfe-Simon

Felisa Wolfe-Simon is an American microbial geobiologist and biogeochemist. In 2010, Wolfe-Simon led a team that discovered GFAJ-1, an extremophile bacterium that they claimed was capable of substituting arsenic for a small percentage of its phosphorus to sustain its growth, thus advancing the remarkable possibility of non-RNA/DNA-based genetics. However, these conclusions were immediately debated and criticized in correspondence to the original journal of publication, and were widely disbelieved by scientists. In 2012, two reports refuting the most significant aspects of the original results were published in the same journal in which the original findings had been previously published. On July 24, 2025, Science formally retracted the 2010 paper, citing expanded retraction criteria and concluding that the experiments did not support the paper's key conclusions; the study's authors objected to the decision.