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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.