What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata

[woolf woolf]

I found a well-written and very interesting article by John Rasko and Carl Power, published by "The Guardian". It's rather long, so be warned: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/18/haruko-obokata-stap-cells-controversy-scientists-lie

 

The year 2014 was one of extremes for Haruko Obokata. A year of high highs and even lower lows. Barely 30 years old, she was head of her own laboratory at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, and was taking the male-dominated world of stem cell research by storm. She was hailed as a bright new star in the scientific firmament and a national hero. But her glory was short-lived and her fall from grace spectacular, completed in several humiliating stages. Obokata shot to prominence in January 2014 when she published two breakthrough articles in Nature, one of the world’s top science journals. She and her colleagues had demonstrated a surprisingly simple way of turning ordinary body cells – she used mouse blood cells – into something very much like embryonic stem cells. All you need to do is drop them into a weak bath of citric acid, let them soak for half an hour and – presto! – you have washed away their developmental past. They emerge like cellular infants, able to multiply abundantly and grow into any type of cell in the body, a superpower known as pluripotency. This was a much faster and easier way to reprogram cells than the one pioneered, back in 2006, by another Japanese scientist, Shinya Yamanaka. Moreover, Obokata’s method seemed much less likely to damage the cells or, worse still, make them cancerous.

 

 

Edited May 30, 2015 by Sousa