Japan’s top research institute yesterday hammered the final nail in the coffin of what was once billed as a groundbreaking stem cell study, dismissing it as flawed and saying the work could have been fabricated.
The revelations come a week after a young researcher at the center of the scandal, which has rocked the country’s scientific establishment, said she would resign after failing to reproduce the successful conversion of an adult cell into a stem cell-like state, known as stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) cells.
The failure marked a stunning fall from grace for 31-year-old Haruko Obokata, whose coresearcher committed suicide amid the embarrassing scandal that prompted respected science journal Nature to retract an article detailing the research.
The government-backed Riken institute, which sponsored the study, yesterday said embryonic stem cells had been added in the process of the research, hammering Obokata’s contention that she had found an easier way to generate new stem cells in the lab.
“But we can’t conclude whether the mixing was done on purpose or by mistake, nor can we conclude who did it,” National Institute of Genetics head and probe team leader Isao Katsura said at a news conference in Tokyo.
In January, Riken touted Obokata’s seemingly simple method of reprogramming adult cells to work like stem cells.
The study was top news in Japan, where the photogenic Obokata, a Harvard-trained scientist, became a phenomenon.
However, media attention soon grew into skepticism as doubts emerged about Obokata’s papers on the STAP cells.
Mistakes were discovered in some data published in two papers, photograph captions were found to be misleading, and the work itself could not be repeated by other scientists.
The head of the probe team, which was made up of scientists outside the institute and lawyers, said the committee interviewed Obokata three times.
“During the last of our interviews, we told her that we had enough evidence to show the mixing-in [of embryonic stem cells],” Katsura said. “Then, before us asking anything, Ms Obokata said: ‘I’ve never mixed them.’”
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