2025-02-11
23 分钟The internet erupted in controversy over Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues’ claim of a microbe thriving on arsenic. Nearly 15 years later, she’s pursuing new research on the boundaries of life.
Hi, I'm Sarah Scholes, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times.
I write mostly about science and technology, but at the beginning of my career,
I worked in science education, and that involved staying up on the latest space news.
One day in 2010, I opened my inbox,
and I had this email from NASA about some big announcement they were going to make
that had something to do with extraterrestrial life.
Everyone was speculating online, and I thought, I have to watch this.
Well, good afternoon, and welcome to NASA headquarters.
Despite widespread speculation on the Internet, ladies and gentlemen,
we are not here today to announce we have found life elsewhere in the universe.
So they didn't find aliens,
but there were claims that this new discovery would change everything we knew about life.
What you will hear today will, in fact, impact the search for life elsewhere and much, much more.
Let me introduce you to our panel.
The face behind this discovery was a woman in her early 30s named Felisa Wolf Simon.
I've led a team that has discovered something that I've been thinking about for many years.
We've cracked open the door to what's possible for life elsewhere in the universe.
And that's profound.
It's a complicated discovery, but if I were going to explain it to one of my students,
I would say that there are six basic elements that all life as we know it uses to function,