Haruko Obokata, Charles Vacanti, and the stem cells that weren't

February 19, 2015 2:01 PM

What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata. The spectacular fall of the Japanese scientist who claimed to have triggered stem cell abilities in regular body cells is not uncommon in the scientific community. The culprit: carelessness and hubris in the drive to make a historic discovery.
posted by daisyk (20 comments total)

Obokata's Stap cells previously.
posted by daisyk at 2:04 PM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

Just read the comments to the Guardian piece. What a nightmare!
posted by No Robots at 2:38 PM on February 19, 2015

The spectacular fall of peer review, more like?
posted by oceanjesse at 2:51 PM on February 19, 2015

Decent lay piece by the Guardian. Doesn't actually deal very much with why Obokata and Vacanti did it.

Been following this fiasco since it first started and it was mindblowingly obvious that it was a fabrication. This is like the falsified cold fusion thing all over again, only with less science by press conference and more fruits of modern science communication. I think that most people were baffled as to why they kept trying to stick with their story when no-one could reproduce the results, especially which was touted as easy to do.

I am intensely curious as to what Obokata's motivations were, and if there's anything hinky going on between Obokata and Vacanti.

This is a spectacular win for peer review. All scientists are peers and after reviewing the claims as a community, quickly dismissed the claims as false. What this is, is a failure of publishing politics.
posted by porpoise at 2:56 PM on February 19, 2015 [8 favorites]

porpoise, the last I heard from the investigation/others trying to replicate it was that the signal Obokata reported was autofluorescence, so some of it may have been sheer incompetence. Admittedly, that's a little like saying they didn't steal your money from the bank, they just happened to light it on fire accidentally ... but of course their behavior afterwards is inexcusable, regardless of how it began.
posted by angst at 3:23 PM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

angst, the genetic testing of the supposedly cloned mice from STAP cells showed that they were from two different ES lines. Maybe they were a contaminant, but it really looks like it was willfull.

Thing for me is, how long did Obokata think she could get away with it? My most generous explanation could be that she was a naive and incompetent dupe. But if she was that utterly incompetent, how did her data get past all the other co-authors who would immediately recognize that she was incompetent and check her data.

Yeah, total train wreck, and I can't help rubbernecking.
posted by porpoise at 3:46 PM on February 19, 2015

How did she think she could get away with it? She probably thought, like the vast majority of papers, it would be ignored and fall to the periphery of her academic area of study, and that maybe someday someone would make it work somehow, and she could take credit for laying the footwork. Remember, the American originator of the idea also claimed it worked, albeit with a different formula, and had confirmed her results. Her concept of 'face" may have included not admitting she and her colleagues were not able to do something the American on the team not only said could be done, but that he had, at least initially, actually gotten it working using her technique. And so the integrity failure feedback loop continues, until everyone loses face and their jobs because they lied, even to each other.
posted by Blackanvil at 3:53 PM on February 19, 2015

How did she think she could get away with it? She probably thought, like the vast majority of papers, it would be ignored and fall to the periphery of her academic area of study, and that maybe someday someone would make it work somehow, and she could take credit for laying the footwork.

No way. She published two papers on induced pluripotency in Nature. She certainly was familiar with the Hwang fiasco; it's essentially the same field! I'm only glancingly familiar with the field, and it's blindingly obvious to me that this work would receive immediate and intense scrutiny.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:36 PM on February 19, 2015 [4 favorites]

The spectacular fall of peer review, more like?

Obokata and colleagues tried to submit to three top journals and were rejected initially. Her employer, RIKEN, released some of the peer reviews from their initial submission to Science ("'Truly extraordinary,' 'simply not credible,' 'suspiciously sharp:' A STAP stem cell peer review report revealed", Retraction Watch). All three of Science's reviewers noted substantial concerns and Science rejected the manuscript. In particular, Reviewer 1 noted that a photograph appeared to be Photoshopped in a way that is often considered a hallmark of scientific misconduct these days.

Given the scrutiny this paper received immediately, and the bad reception at other journals, it's really hard to believe that Nature's reviewers gave it a positive reception. Unless someone releases the reviews, I guess we won't know.
posted by grouse at 5:01 PM on February 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

Obokata was not acting alone. She took the fall though. There is some speculation she will reinvent herself as an AV actress. Jesus wept.
posted by Nevin at 5:16 PM on February 19, 2015

porpoise, I hadn't heard about the two different ES lines. You're right, that's quite odd and does sound more than just carelessness.

In terms of getting away with it, I would say that I don't work in stem cells, but I used to work in another hot buzzword field with a lot of, eh, let's say hard-to-reproduce results and this sort of thing happens a lot more than we like to think.
posted by angst at 5:50 PM on February 19, 2015

There is some speculation she will reinvent herself as an AV actress.

Isn't this all from sources known mostly for hating any woman who Does a Thing?
posted by 1adam12 at 7:00 PM on February 19, 2015 [5 favorites]

Isn't this all from sources known mostly for hating any woman who Does a Thing?

Yes, the only sources for that are "internet commenters". (Unless I'm missing something, the only serious articles that even mention it do so to cast scorn on those anonymous internet trolls who are saying it).
posted by thefoxgod at 7:17 PM on February 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, Obokata's thinking on this is really bizarre. She *had* to have known what a splash it would make to the scientific world--hell, even laymen like myself were going to be amazed! So why she didn't make absolutely sure that her results could be duplicated--at least by herself but especially by others--is kind of astounding.

I've read how she's the fall...gal, and how there are a lot more players to blame. That is certainly true, but she's also the one who had no issue at all being made into Japan's biggest science celebrity in 2014. I can only imagine that the more publicity she got, the more the pressure on her began to build. The only thing that is a mystery is if she knew (she had to have known!) that her science was phoney, or if she had bullshitted so many others so often that she had bought the lies herself, and believed the lies to be true.
posted by zardoz at 7:40 PM on February 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

The spectacular fall of peer review, more like?

This case (like many others mentioned in the article) was undone by people attempting to replicate the results. I wouldn't call that the "fall of peer review".
posted by kagredon at 8:15 PM on February 19, 2015 [2 favorites]

I remember talking to a friend of a friend professor at a molecular biology conference a few years ago (a little while before the stem cell controversy kicked off) who'd just rejected a paper from a Japanese group that contained an obviously Photoshopped Western blot. He told me that wasn't the first Japanese paper he'd rejected for apparent fabrications. His told me Japanese science has been the victim of budget cuts, pay cuts, hiring freezes, and promotion bans in recent years, resulting in enormous pressure on groups to get results. This, in combination with a high pressure work culture has resulted in everything from subtle fudging of data to outright fabrication.
posted by kersplunk at 2:13 AM on February 20, 2015 [2 favorites]

How did she think she could get away with it? She probably thought, like the vast majority of papers, it would be ignored and fall to the periphery of her academic area of study, and that maybe someday someone would make it work somehow, and she could take credit for laying the footwork.

There's no way that would happen for this paper. The whole reason this was so novel was precisely that it made it look so easy to induce pluripotency, obviously the first thing anyone interested in stem cells would do after reading it is to try it for themselves.
posted by atrazine at 2:54 AM on February 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

I was thinking when I read this article that it sounded a bit like a technothriller, and I'd love to read a book inspired by these events. I too would love to know how things played out between Okobata and Vacanti. I think there should be more scrutiny of his role in this, but as someone in the Guardian comment thread pointed out, while his university may well be investigating, they're unlikely to go as public with the results as the Riken Centre has done.
posted by daisyk at 4:31 AM on February 20, 2015 [1 favorite]

while his university may well be investigating, they're unlikely to go as public with the results as the Riken Centre has done.

Brigham and Women's Hospital is probably a little shy about these things at the moment, given that another stem cell researcher has just sued them over their investigation of another stem cell misconduct case. ("Stem cell researchers sue Harvard, claiming faulty investigation lost them job offers", Retraction Watch).
posted by grouse at 4:37 AM on February 20, 2015 [3 favorites]

Thats a good point, I don't think institutions in Japan would be nearly as worried about lawsuits as American ones. (Not only is there lots of cultural pressure not to sure, but the legal system is much less friendly to lawsuits than the US one).
posted by thefoxgod at 3:22 PM on February 20, 2015