Key Researcher Agrees To Retract Disputed Stem Cell Papers

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "After several months of fiercely defending her discovery of a new, simple way to create pluripotent stem cells, Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, has agreed to retract the two Nature papers that reported her work. Satoru Kagaya, head of public relations for RIKEN, headquartered in Wako near Tokyo, confirmed press reports today that Obokata had finally agreed to retract both papers. He said the institute would be notifying Nature and that the decision to formally retract the papers would be up to the journal."

Comments

Fabricated results

[kruach aum]

Another article I read about this mentioned that she confessed to fabricating "at least some results". Now, there are various reasons why a researcher would fabricate results, from the pressure to publish to just literally being evil, but in this case how would she ever expect to get away with it? This is not like a paper in my sub-field, which if I'm lucky five people will ever read. EVERYONE wants pluripotent stem cells, so of course a simple method to create them is going to be tested and replicated over and over and over.

Re:Fabricated results

[TemperedAlchemist]

I haven't read the paper nor do I have the expertise to really comment on the technicality of it, but it could be that they knew the method worked, but didn't reproduce it enough for it to be real solid and scientifically valid. And with budget/time constraints it could have gone quite simply as just fabricating data to push it out faster.

Re:Fabricated results

[jellomizer]

Publish or Parish, is the motto for researchers.
In a field where everyone wants your data, that means there are a lot of people working on it.
So people may fabricate their results to what they feel would be the expected results, as a gamble, if it works they are first and they are the hero and they get a lot of money and fame. If they fail their story gets retracted, they find a way to point the finger at someone else and suffer some shame until people forget.

Re:Fabricated results

[Anonymous Coward]

Outside of Louisiana, we just call them counties.

Re:Fabricated results

[Stem_Cell_Brad]

I think this is the explanation. The lead author convinced herself that the procedure worked. Apparently, she was rather easily convinced by her own ideas. In order to convince other scientists, she had to fabricate some results. Those fabricated results enabled publication of the papers through peer review.

The whole thing stinks. Let's say there is some merit to making pluripotent cells by stressing them with acid. Well, by lying about some of her results, the lead author essentially poisoned the whole area of research. She has made it difficult to now work on this topic because it will be overly scrutinized by any reviewer. Let say the whole idea is bogus. The lead author wasted time and energy of researchers around the world who are interested in this process.

Although this may be obvious. The lesson is just never make up data. It is so myopic to think that you will benefit in any REAL way.

Re:Fabricated results

[Charliemopps]

You're asuming it went something like "I'll make this stuff up and no-one will know!"

I doubt that's what happened. Most lies start very innocently. For example:

When I was much younger and dumber... a freshman in my FIRST attempt at college... I had... some class... probably biology or something. We were put into groups of about 5 students each. We were supposed to come up with experiments and provide a result. Well, we were going to grow beansprouts under different condition and report on the best way to grow them. I volunteered to take "Light" and would grow my sprouts under sunlight, ambient indoor light in my dorm and a black light.

Well... I was kind of busy drinking heavily and never got around to it. I'd never even bought the black light. Then, Suddenly (3 months later), one of my group who I totally forgot about asked for the results. Well, it should have been clear right? Sun is best, ambient is ok, Black light would have killed them. Who's to know I didn't actually do it right? It's a choice I made in less than the second it took me to answer her, but I regretted it immediately. It would have been far easier to admit my failure than admit the lie, but what was done was done so we reported all our results. got a B+ and everyone was happy! Whew... load off my mind. Then, a few days later the professor was talking about something and I was totally not paying attention and he turned to me "Well you have a blacklight right? Bring it in tomorrow and we could try that out!" I nearly peed myself.

I got out of it by running to walmart... but I suspect she started with a small white lie like I did... and things snowballed. Each time she was in a bind, she had to make the lie worse. Until eventually she was defending herself to an international crowd and ruining her career. Don't lie... but if you do and get caught, come clean asap. The longer you wait, the worse it will get.

Re:Fabricated results

[steelfood]

In the biomedical research field, everybody fabricates results. Or selects them. Or fails to do the research properly and contaminates the experiment. That's why so few experiments are easily reproduced, and a good chunk of published literature eventually gets refuted, or at the very least, refined. The only thing is that scientists don't attempt to reproduce most experiments. So nobody really knows for sure what's real and what's not.

There's pressure to publish, but there's also pressure to selectively publish positive results. No journal will publish experimental dead-ends, so nobody writes papers saying their experiment failed. And so people who spend years of their life working on an experiment will force their paper through by forcing a positive result from the data if it doesn't go the way they intend.

Things are only really called out when there's a lot of money involved in the results of an experiment, and there's pressure from private industry to monetize, stem cells in this case, clones in the other. Otherwise, things languish for 30 or more years before somebody takes a good, long hard look at the data. Sometimes, it's because the original researcher has to die first before the revocation is even allowed to happen.

Look at that fish oil B.S. recently. It was known fact for 30+ years that fish oil, specifically omega 3 fatty acid was beneficial for the cardiovascular system. Turns out somebody fabricated it, and nobody caught on for the next 30 years.

Or Dolly, the cloned sheep who turned out not to be a real clone. Or any early literature on vitamins supplements, whose effects are largely found to have been literally pissed away. Or the ever-changing food pyramid and other nutritional recommendations.

And I don't even have to mention all of the monetary incentive-based skewed research.

Pure research, that which deals in either the microcosm or the macrocosm exclusively, is not subjected to this fault. The former tends to not have such ambiguities, and the former is taken as ambiguous by nature. But beware reseach that tries to tie the two worlds together (for example, asserting that a protein deficiency is correlated to a certain disease, or tying cell phones to medical disorders) and presents some solid, concrete result. Both socially and academically, we're still unable to support that kind of research the way it should be supported. And so it's really a crapshoot which paper ends up withstanding the test of time and which one doesn't.

Re:Fabricated results

[steelfood]

Publish or Parish, is the motto for researchers.

Somehow, I'm not sure priesthood would be the alternate profession of choice for out-of-work scientists.

"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

"The science of the two papers was rigorously, robustly peer-reviewed as part of our usual editorial procedures. Any inaccuracies in the presentation of data that may have come to light since the peer review are being investigated," the Nature representative wrote. "We are always looking for ways to improve our processes to best serve the community and will continue to do so going forward."

And this is Nature fer chrissakes; not the Journal of Homeopathic Chiropractic Aroma Therapy and Crystal Meditation.

Re:"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[geekoid]

Do you know understand publication and peer review?
Nature peer review means that the data and methodology looked good and rigorous.
If they laid about the data, or some methodology it's very hard to know that unless if is really obvious.
This is why publication is only the beginning of peer review. After publication other experts can look at it and try to reproduce the results. This is also why the most interesting papers are the second papers.

Re:"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[sandytaru]

If the methodology looked good and the data looked reasonable, it'd pass the initial round of peer review. They don't recreate the experiment as part of the editorial peer review, they just look for things that were overlooked or that don't make sense. It's up to other labs to reproduce the results and subsequently publish their own papers.

Re:"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[Anonymous Coward]

"The science of the two papers was rigorously, robustly peer-reviewed as part of our usual editorial procedures. Any inaccuracies in the presentation of data that may have come to light since the peer review are being investigated," the Nature representative wrote. "We are always looking for ways to improve our processes to best serve the community and will continue to do so going forward."

And this is Nature fer chrissakes; not the Journal of Homeopathic Chiropractic Aroma Therapy and Crystal Meditation.

Sigh, I'll point out what gets said it every one of these topics:

The point of peer review isn't to uncover fraud. That's the job for follow-up studies (like we saw in this case).

The point of peer review is to catch things like logical flaws. Do the conclusions follow from the data? Are there any obvious problems in the experimental setup? Did they mess up any math anywhere?

Catching fraud usually requires that the experiment be repeated. The initial peer review process of the initial article doesn't (and generally can't) do that. The whole point of the initial article is to put the experiment and the result into the literature and the community consciousness, THEN have other scientists attempt to reproduce the results. The fraud will presumably be caught then, if it exists. It worked in this case.

Now, I'll give you that science has a problem right now where not enough follow-up studies are being done. This means that there is way too much fraud, especially in the life sciences. But this is actually a case where the process seems to have worked pretty well.

Re:"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[oh_my_080980980]

I do and supposedly experts (referees) in your field of research are suppose to review the material. Mistakes, easily identifiable, made it past them which should not have:

"First, to take a random example, the Obokata et al. article refers to “pasture pipettes” rather than “Pasteur pipettes.” The existence of such an obvious error suggests that the nine authors, as well as the referees, editors, and copy editors were all, to put it bluntly, slackers. Some of the actions taken by the authors in apparently inappropriately editing and recycling figures might arguably have been uncatchable by the referees and editors, but surely this simple typo should have been caught by someone. Maybe the referees and editors who missed this should be put out to pasture.

More seriously, Nature has some heavy-duty explaining to do. An earlier version of the Obokata et al. paper was rejected, but then the problem-beset version published in late January was finally accepted. I’d like to see Nature, while protecting the identity of the referees, disclose (on their website) all of the editorial correspondence (redacted appropriately) and every version of the submitted papers, so we can all judge whether or not the decision by Nature to accept the papers was appropriate based on the information available to them at the time."

http://www.ipscell.com/tag/rob...

Re:"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

The investigating panel said:

The report also says that the experiments are so poorly documented "that it will be extremely difficult for anyone else to accurately trace or understand her experiments." In a stinging summary, the committee wrote: "Dr. Obokata's actions and sloppy data management lead us to the conclusion that she sorely lacks, not only a sense of research ethics, but also integrity and humility as a scientific researcher."

Again, this is Nature we're talking about. Every time we get one of these situations, the apologists start up with "but peer-review wasn't meant to find that...", and yet the journals themselves are always chest-thumping about how everything they publish is infallible because it was peer-reviewed, except when it isn't, and then it's not their fault. Peer-review is just a crutch. It imparts a false sense on confidence where there shouldn't be any.

Re:"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[ColdWetDog]

Peer review is not a crutch. It is a necessary, but not sufficient check and balance. That said, the peer reviewers MAY have performed less than admirably (hey, it happens). The part that really has turned up under closer review is her methodology is awful. Peer reviewers tend to work along the assumption that the researcher knows what they are doing. That assumption appears to be incorrect (recall the first three letters of the word). Looking a detailed Materials and Methods is amazingly boring and often not even possible because editors don't want to 'waste' space in their precious journal having somebody detail where they got a reagent from or exactly how they (supposedly) did things.

There is an increasing trend to require authors to put such details in the paper. Typically in a web based supplement (so it doesn't waste space in the precious journal). This trend has started for precisely these reasons.

Nature is going to eat some deserved crow on this one. Fortunately, that is the time tested recipe for improvement.

Re:"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[ericloewe]

I'll have you know that the Journal of Homeopathic Chiropractic Aroma Therapy and Crystal Meditation practices peer review to the highest scientific standards.

To increase potency of the review, 15 scientists are tasked with reviewing each article. One of their reviews is then sent to 10 000 experts, who review the review. This step is repeated a few times. Finally, the resulting review is sent to our chinese editor (who at times is too busy editing other prestigious publications like the American Chinese Traditional Medicine and Voodoo annals and thus delegates this job to his team of highly-trained monkeys) who decides whether to publish or not.

Of course, this review cannot be questioned, otherwise it will never accurately review anything, as the trust between Journal and reviewers is broken.

Re:"Rigorous" peer-review ahahahahahaha

[Stem_Cell_Brad]

Yeah, peer review is a horrible system. The only thing it has going for it is that it is better than other method of assessing these sorts of things.

publication is just the beginning of peer review.

[geekoid]

It also only looks at the data and methodology. if the data is wrong, they have no way of knowing that unless they actually do the experiment.

Big news in Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole thing has been very large in Japanese media, largely due to the fact that it was initially reported as a huge discovery by a young female researcher.
 
  The latest article I read just now is about how she (through her lawyer) claims that she was forced to agree to this through huge pressure, that she's very sad about how it leaked out, etc.
 
I don't doubt the pressure part, and I imagine that there's a lot of feelings involved for her and that she believes she's right and that she thinks that the things she did weren't really "in bad spirit", but knowing how easy it is to fool oneself it all seems a bit like someone who doesn't want to accept that it might not quite be what she wanted it to be.

Slippery slope

[negnin]

I think a lot of these cases of fabricating results started relatively small and innocent. Maybe you slacked off all week and your professor is asking you for the results of that experiment you were supposed to run. Maybe you'll just make a little graph that seems reasonable, after all, you'll get those results this week for sure... Next thing you know your boss is asking for the follow up experiments and you're in over your head. The longer this go on the harder it is to come clean and you end up publishing your fabricated results in Nature...

Re:publication is just the beginning of peer revie

[geekoid]

My statement has nothing to do with Nature. It's a statement on the peer review process in general. Many people think publication is the end of peer review and that a published paper means its been fully vetted.

Nature has over 10,000 people that volunteer. It looks like the ones that did this peer review messed up.
IT's a hard problem. You get peer reviewers, you do your best to be sure they are good. You can't peer review there peer review so you trust them.
That also applies to any organization that has peer reviewers.
Don't confuse my wanting things to be clear, and waiting for more informaiton before damning anyone as excuse making. It is not.

1) Did nature follow their own policy when determining who to peer review the paper?
2) Did Nature have a good reason to trust that peer reviewer initially?
3) Did other peer reviewers bring up issues that were unreasonably dismissed?
and so on.

Like I said, it is a hard problem.

I assure you I am not out of my depth.