In Lake Mono, a highly alkaline lake in California, bacteria were found that were said to be able to survive on arsenic instead of phosphorus. Both the resultant article and its much later retraction have caused quite a stir. | Photo: Gregoire Thibaud / Unsplash

“This is new territory”, said Martyn Poliakoff in January 2026 on the popular YouTube channel ‘Periodic Videos’. In his day job, he’s a professor of chemistry at the University of Nottingham. The reason for his astonishment was Science magazine’s decision in July 2025 to retract an article that had made huge waves 15 years earlier. Its authors had supposedly proven that when the amount of the essential element phosphorus is deficient, certain bacteria can replace it with the toxic element arsenic. This was deemed so incredible that the article in question had initially been published alongside responses from eight commentators plus a reply from the original authors. It also triggered a fierce backlash – including personal attacks on the researchers themselves.

“We stand by the data as reported. These data were peer-reviewed, openly debated in the literature, and stimulated productive research”.

This article was retracted so long after its publication not because any of its authors had committed an error, or because there was any hint of fraud. Science explained its decision as follows in a blog post: “Given the evidence that the results were based on contamination, Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data”. The evidence in question came from replication studies. But the authors of the original article all protested against the retraction: “We stand by the data as reported. These data were peer-reviewed, openly debated in the literature, and stimulated productive research”.

Ariel Anbar, one of the original authors and a chemist at Arizona State University, admitted the following to Periodic Videos: “The paper was a little fuzzy about that and that allowed some of the public relations and media and some of the authors too in conversations to drive things a little further than needed to be driven”. And he added: “We think this is a debate really about interpretation, and debates about interpretation are of course part and parcel of the scientific process”. Poliakoff, the poster boy for Periodic Videos, is left pondering a different question, namely: “Should the paper be completely retracted, or should the paper be left there but with a health warning saying it’s very unlikely that this is true?”.

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