• That acid stem cell thing? It's bullshit and misconduct
    9 replies, posted
[quote]It seemed almost too good to be true — and it was. Two papers1, 2 that offered a major breakthrough in stem-cell biology were retracted on 2 July, mired in a controversy that has damaged the reputation of several Japanese researchers. The saga of the STAP stem cells Electric stimuli provide new therapies Images of the month: June 2014 For scientists worldwide it has triggered painful memories of a decade-old scandal. In February 2004, South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang announced that he had generated stem-cell lines from cloned human embryos3, creating a potential source of versatile, therapeutic cells that would be genetically matched to any patient. A frenzy of excitement followed this and a subsequent publication4, but that didn’t compare with the media firestorm when the results were revealed to be fabricated. The two main cloning papers were retracted5, and the careers of some dozen scientists were devastated. In the soul-searching that followed, ‘research integrity’ became a hot topic, scientists re-evaluated the responsibilities of authorship, and institutions vowed to improve the way that they police their staff. Nature and other journals also made promises, saying that they would vet manuscripts more thoroughly. In an Editorial at the time, Nature wrote6: “Keeping in mind the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Nature may in rare cases demand it.” A year later, when Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland claimed to have cloned embryonic-stem-cell lines from monkeys7, Nature required independent tests to verify that the lines came from the monkey donors. This verification was published alongside the cloning paper8. “I applaud what they did,” says Alan Trounson, the outgoing president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in San Francisco, who helped with the testing. Then came Japan’s stem-cell case. This January, Haruko Obokata, a young biochemist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, reported in Nature1, 2 that she had converted mouse cells to an embryonic-like state merely by subjecting them to stress, such as physical pressure or exposure to acid (see Nature 505, 596; 2014). The process, labelled stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP), was so contrary to current thinking that some scientists said they accepted it based only on the reputation of Obokata’s co-authors, who were some of the most trusted names in stem-cell research and cloning... ...On 1 April, a RIKEN investigative committee concluded that Obokata had committed scientific misconduct. She maintained that the results were real, but one by one her co-authors withdrew support for the findings. In principle, Nature retracts articles only when all co-authors agree, although in rare cases papers can be retracted even if one or more of the authors dissent. In June, Obokata relented and agreed to retract both papers (see go.nature.com/wsfox5). She has not responded to multiple requests for interview since April. She has, however, been invited to participate — under surveillance — in ongoing efforts at RIKEN to verify the original findings. Related stories Should the papers have been published in the first place? Critics have argued that many of the flaws could have been identified beforehand by Nature — the easiest, in theory, being a 17-line passage that was taken almost word for word from a 2005 paper11 by another group. To detect signs of plagiarism, most journals use a service called CrossCheck. It can compare a submitted manuscript with some 40 million published articles from around 100,000 titles, looking for text matches. Nature editors did use CrossCheck and did not find the match. But the journal from which the text was lifted, In Vitro Cellular & Developmental Biology — Animal, had not been indexed by the service at the time. “Although the databases are very large and growing, there are limitations,” explains Rachael Lammey, a product manager at CrossRef in Oxford, UK, which provides the CrossCheck service. Such misses get flagged “a couple times a year”, she says, but there is no way to know how many instances of plagiarism fall through the cracks. Moreover, identifying the match probably would not have halted publication. Many instances of copied text do not constitute plagiarism and just require citation of the original source. Indeed, the RIKEN investigative committee concluded that the passage — a methodological description — should have cited the original, but that the failure to do so was not misconduct. The committee was more vexed by instances of manipulated and duplicated images in the STAP papers. Obokata had spliced together gel lanes from different experiments to appear as one. And she had used an image of cells in a teratoma — a tumorous growth that includes multiple types of tissue — that had also appeared in her PhD dissertation. The captions indicated that the image was being used to represent different types of cell in each case. The committee judged that in both instances, although she might not have intended to mislead, she should have been “aware of the danger” and therefore found her guilty of misconduct. Obokata claimed that they were mistakes and has denied wrongdoing... [/quote] [url]http://www.nature.com/news/research-integrity-cell-induced-stress-1.15507[/url]
snip, misread.
[QUOTE=Zonesylvania;45317240]Oho, so they were mistakes, were they? You can claim they were all you like behind the bars of a cell, scoundrels like this deserve no less.[/QUOTE] It actually seems like the things found in the publication were not terribly out of place and wouldn't have impacted publication. The main issue is that the results couldn't be replicated so far and that the co-authors didn't take care to replicate the experiment fully or fully independently.
God damnit. I was so excited for this.
[QUOTE=Zonesylvania;45317240]Oho, so they were mistakes, were they? You can claim they were all you like behind the bars of a cell, scoundrels like this deserve no less.[/QUOTE] Snip, never mind. I didn't see the bit about plagiarism.
Pretty surprising considering it was in one of my Biology Textbooks as fact iirc.
[QUOTE=The mouse;45318810]Pretty surprising considering it was in one of my Biology Textbooks as fact iirc.[/QUOTE] How is that surprising though? "Facts" change every year that's why there are new texbooks every year.
was hoping this was lsd related but it isn't
[QUOTE=Jackald;45325976]The article makes out like this is a huge disgrace, but misleading results and peer assessment often draws conclusions like this.[/QUOTE] Except this isn't a case where there's some artefact in the data causing people to misinterpret. There is both deliberate and accidental (but probably also deliberate) misconduct here. [editline]8th July 2014[/editline] It's also a disgrace how this got published at all without verification. If the results were true then this would have had a huge impact on stem cell research but is so contrary to what we know at the moment. The tests are comparatively easy (at least they seemed so) compared to other studies.
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