Rose Redfield seems to be everywhere in Vancouver these days. Last week (April 19, 2012) she spoke at the first ScienceOnline Vancouver Event and tonight she’s at Café Scientifique at the Railway Club, 579 Dunsmuir St. (second floor) at 7:30 pm.

Here’s the event description straight from the news release,

Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Rosie Redfield, the biologist from UBC who was recently named one of the “10 People Who Mattered” in 2011 by Nature magazine. (http://www.nature.com/news/365-days-nature-s-10-1.9678 ).

The title and abstract for her café is:

#arseniclife and Open Science
The #arseniclife story started with a bang in late 2010, when NASA proudly announced the discovery that some bacteria could synthesize their DNA with arsenic in the backbone in place of phosphorus. But within a few days it all fell apart, as scientists used blogs and Twitter to conduct impromptu ‘post-publication peer review’. (‘#arseniclife’ is the Twitter hashtag used to identify relevant tweets.) Working with collaborators at Princeton, my lab has now shown that the key results cannot be replicated. This debacle has implications for many aspects of science, from how personal biases and funding sources affect scientific judgment to the increasing roles of social media in both the practice and public communication of science.

I hope she’s addressed that problem with overmodulation that I described in my comments about last week’s ScienceOnline Vancouver event (my April 20, 2012 posting) because she’s very interesting.

For anyone not familiar with the #arseniclife story, here’s my Dec. 8, 2012 apology  posting about it (with links to other more informed writing) and my blooper Dec. 6, 2010 posting.