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Senior RIKEN Scientist Involved In Stem Cell Scandal Commits Suicide
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Yoshiki Sasai, a noted stem cell scientist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, who co-authored two controversial and later retracted papers that reported a simple way of reprogramming mature cells, was confirmed dead this morning, an apparent suicide. Local media reported he was found hanging from a stairway railing in the RIKEN complex in Kobe. Sasai was rushed to a nearby hospital but efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. He reportedly left a suicide note, but it has not been made public."
Oh yeah, competitors are out to murder their disgraced colleague for all his fame he got from his famously retracted paper. We must be on the right trail, Dr. Holmes.
The article makes it seem like the retracted Nature articles were why he committed suicide (or a major contributor to it).. but they weren't really his fault. Haruko Obokata was the lead researcher on those, and also the person responsible for fabricating the research results. Sure, his name was on it as a co-author, but that sounds more like the result of office politics than actually believing what she was publishing. Even his employer seemed like they held him in high regard after the scandal broke.
Sucks to see a man driven to suicide by something he didn't do.
0) Labs around the world are researching patentable stem-cell cures at their own expense.
1) Group finds (comparatively) trivial way to produce them and releases said on the internet, encouraging others to try.
2) [Insert unknown]
3) Research is discredited, careers ruined, and dude is dead.
Is '2' something like "research is totally false and harms science itself by its very existence so the villains must be crushed" or more like "research is close enough to scare the shit out of some heavily-invested peers"?
Whichever one it winds up being, the response to 'crappy scientific paper' is NOT typically burning at the stake, so some unknown must be at work here.
Fetal stem cells. FETAL.
F E T A L
That is spelled
F
E
T
A
L
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It is Japan. People kill themselves on a daily basis there. It is practically a national hobby.
Here is a list of countries by suicide rate. Japan is near the top. Japan's suicide rate is higher than America's suicide rate and murder rate combined.
Except his research was on using adult stem cells, so it is unlikely he would have triggered the angst of religious or abortion groups.
Sometimes true, sometimes not. An enterprise parasite looking for a golden parachute would rationally prefer to suppress disruption to his personal agenda in the short term rather than enhancing the business in the long term. Disclaimer: I hold no opinion on any conspiracy theories of this case.
There was an article in the New Yorker last year - I wish I could find it - that talked about the enormous about of pressure being put on academic journals that affect big industries. It described cases where Monsanto and another big corporation set out to destroy an otherwise well-respected scientist who discovered a high health risk from one of their products.
The part of the story I found most surprising was not the online stalking, the financial pressure put on the academic departments that these researchers work, or the out-and-out physical threats (pets poisoned after phone threats, etc), but rather that there have been editors of scientific journals who have been pressured to call for retraction of papers that they themselves reviewed positively. The New Yorker writer actually got two of these peer reviewers to admit that they had gotten pressured and one had succumbed to pressure after his fellowship funding was threatened. The company that was trying to cover its ass threatened to pull funding for a new lab at a land grant university if this reviewer didn't call for the paper to be retracted. The guy so much as admitted that the only reason he had called for retraction was the pressure.
When you have billions of dollars on the line, I don't see why anyone would be surprised that there might be people willing to do some very nasty things, up to and including murder. People will kill over a pair of sneakers, I'm pretty sure they'd kill over billions.
I'm a go see if I can find that article.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sure, but the point is: the American religious never objected to stem cell research in general, only quite specifically to embryonic stem cell stuff. And, really, it is a bit creepy, and I think it's great that it's starting to look like embryonic stem cells aren't all that important to the field after all, and maybe humanity can give that particular sort of creepiness a miss (imagine e.g. a situation where the only way to get a cure for your illness was to conceive an embryo for harvest - just so many kinds of creepy there).
Questions of medical ethics, especially in research, shouldn't be lightly brushed aside regardless of where they come from. Finding an approach where such questions just aren't relevant is welcomed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It helps if you remember Iceland is the green one, and Greenland is the icy one...
Greenland is dark and miserable, living conditions for those in rural areas can suck, with few roads, no flushing toilets, barely running water.
Urban life is better, but it's a shock more people don't kill themselves.
Not everyone bothers with these distinctions. To say that the debate is one rife with ignorance is to master the skill of understatement.
It's not the religious fundamentalist groups that are the ones that typically purposefully conflate the two.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Suicide is the leading cause of death in men aged 20–44 in Japan.
Wikipeida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
I've always wanted to go, just so I can say I have been. Also, Greenland has quite possibly the coolest flag in the world, next to Nepal.
Also, Iceland is rather icy, especially in the middle. Like greenland.
Certainly more appropriate then fecal stem cells.
Not everyone bothers with these distinctions. To say that the debate is one rife with ignorance is to master the skill of understatement.
Religious people were against stem cells from aborted fetuses because they considered it murder. There is nothing hard to understand about this.
Therefore, a way to do this with adult (or any non-abortion-based cells) would be hailed by the religious.
You should learn what people claim before drawing conclusions. As with the Hobby Lobby argument, stopping implantation might not technically be an "abortion", but it is killing a viable embryo nevertheless, "ensouled", so to speak. People stop being facetious.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And publish or perish has an even deeper meaning in many Asian countries.
Both the pressure to release things before they are fully proven.
And the pressure to always succeed no matter the costs.
The lack of critiques by junior scientists involved in the institutions and labs involved is another cause of these distorted results.
One of the first thing scientists from Asian countries learn when they work in US labs is that they are expected to critique and question senior scientists, which is regarded as Not Done in their original countries.
(this is an observation based on personal experiences)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Disclaimer: I work in bioscience, so I actually know a thing or two about the process.
If there is a comparatively trivial way to produce stem cells THAT ACTUALLY WORKS, people will go heads over tail to do it themselves. I'd assume every lab that is even remotely connected to the stem cell field would set people on replicating this since the method is basically the equivalent of turning lead into gold. It is the holy grail. No matter how much money you have, no matter how much influence you have, you can't contain such a breakthrough, especially not after it's published. That is, if it actually is what it is claimed to be.
On the other hand, if you claim to have made such a breakthrough, everyone tries it out and no one can replicate it, weeeellll, you'll piss a few people off. Considerably more people than when you just say you found that protein X interacts in subcascade Y under conditions Z and it turns out it doesn't after all.
And if serious intentional misconduct is found, the result is burning at stake. I suggest having a look at http://retractionwatch.com/
And finally, Sasai wasn't the main author behind the whole thing but rather the seniour guy who slapped his seal of approval on it. So even IF the conspiracy nutjobs were true, it's the wrong man that's dead.
If you ask me about it, one of the most important things when getting killed is the awareness part. As in, if you have to kill me, please do it in my sleep, so that I go to sleep but never wake up. Every time I wake up it's a new surprise. So if you have to kill an embryo, you should do it before it's aware, before it develops a functioning brain and senses, like a skin that can sense heartbeat or motions. By the way it's easy to step back and just reject all embryonic research, but had you had the chance to walk in Christopher Reeds shoes, you might have ended up being a big fan too or stem cell research, as the only way to live your life normally again, at the expense of killing an unconscious, unborn embryo, who was never meant to be born in the first place, but created for stem cells. People kill each other all over the world, sometimes with the blessing of the highest of the highest powers. Such as Bin Ladin, watched by the whole White House while it was going down. You say he committed a crime, but a child is born innocent. And you would be right. But innocent was a cow that sits as steak on your plate, with more conscience and life "wasted" than an embryo of a few cells. I don't have a problem flushing sperm, potential for life down the toilet. And neither do women flushing eggs from periods. Not every potential egg has to turn into a child. So we're wasting all the reproductive capacity, potential for human life, as a custom, and we're wasting live creatures with eyes, ears and brains, for meat on our plates, but we're not willing to waste a few undifferentiated embryonic cells to fix somebody in a wheelchair? It's complicated, I know it's complicated. That's why I'm happy I don't have to deal with it, and let other people do it. That's how I deal with meat, I'll eat it, but I let other people do the killing. Makes me feel less guilty.
I work in bioscience too, and this thread is making my head hurt. Anyone who actually follows the biomedical literature would be aware that there's practically an epidemic of shitty papers that should have never been published in the first place, and that many supposedly groundbreaking results have turned out to be impossible to reproduce. And it's not even the first time there's been huge controversy over sketchy stem-cell protocols. For this to be a conspiracy by unnamed entities in the "global medical services" industry, we'd have to stipulate that the conspirators are able to a) subvert the (British) journal Nature into first publishing the paper with planted duplicate images (which would require knowing about it in advance of publication), then retracting the paper several months later, b) subvert every independent lab that claimed to have tried and failed to reproduce the experiment, and c) corrupt the largest research institute in Japan to produce a finding of fraud. The whole thing requires a godlike level of competency and power (in addition to pure evil) that makes Monsanto look like a ten-year-old's lemonade stand business.