Felisa Wolfe-Simon

Felisa Wolfe -Simon is a Geomikrobiologin. It is NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the U.S. Geological Survey and a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

Life

Wolfe -Simon studied at Oberlin College. In 2006 she received a National Science Foundation post- doctoral fellowship to support their work at Harvard and Arizona State University. In 2010 she was honored with the Kavli Fellowship of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Her research is supported by the NASA Exobiology / Evolutionary Biology program. She was head of a team that has discovered an extremophile bacterium ( GFAJ -1). Wolfe -Simon and her team published a report in which they which arsenic refer to this bacterium as the first known organism as part of its DNA used in December 2010. Several other scientists around the world have expressed skepticism that conclusion and reported considerable criticism of the methodology used to.

A review in 2012 showed that arsenic has no share in the genetic information of the bacterial strain and the original thesis has to be rejected.