In the late 1960s Jerome Levine classified the odd highdimensional
knot concordance groups in terms of a linking
matrix associated to an arbitrary bounding manifold for the
knot. His proof fails for classical knots in S3. Yet this philosophy
has remained the only known strategy for understanding
the classical knot concordance group. We show that this strategy
is fundamentally flawed. Specifically, in 1982, in support
of Levine’s philosophy, Louis Kauffman conjectured that if
a knot in S3 is a slice knot then on any Seifert surface for
that knot there exists a homologically essential simple closed
curve of self-linking zero which is itself a slice knot, or at least
has Arf invariant zero. Since that time, considerable evidence
has been amassed in support of this conjecture. In particular,
many invariants that obstruct a knot from being a slice
knot have been explicitly expressed in terms of invariants
of such curves on its Seifert surface. We give counterexamples
to Kauffman’s conjecture, that is, we exhibit (smoothly)
slice knots that admit (unique minimal genus) Seifert surfaces
on which every homologically essential simple closed curve of