Major stem cell study debunked on scientific social network

ResearchGate has found itself at the centre of an international debunking of a Japanese paper that claimed to have found a simple way to generate pluripotent stem cells.

The social network for scientists launched in 2008 as a push back against traditional academia and the peer review process. It has now launched Open Review as part of that platform, a system that lets users "publish an open and transparent review of any paper that you have read, worked with, or cited" with the central question always being "is this research reproducible?" Professor Kenneth Ka Ho Lee, chief of stem cell research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, found the answer was no.

"We even repeated it three times -- we're quite confident it doesn't work," Lee told Wired.co.uk. "If we had only repeated it once it would not have been fair on the author."

The papers in question were published in Nature and experiments were carried out at the Riken Institute in Japan. It is lead author, 30-year-old Haruko Obokata, who has been in the firing line.

The papers describe a technique whereby adult mouse blood cells are transformed into pluripotent stem cells after being submerged in an acid bath. The paper was groundbreaking and the method was seen as having the potential to massively speed up human stem cell research.

"When I read the paper, I said 'stop everything and just do this experiment', because we thought it might work," Lee told Wired.co.uk. This was partly down to the fact that Teruhiko Wakayama, a cloning expert from the Yamanashi University, was named as a co-author on the study. He has since called for the papers to be retracted after more and more speculation emerged over duplicated images from old papers were identified in the studies, along with several other irregularities now being investigated at Riken.

"He is very reputable and was the first guy to clone a mouse," said Lee. "So when the paper came out I half believed the process. When we first started I thought 'great, we could be the first to try the experiment in human cells. If we could produce it in human cells we can get published'."

As soon as the papers were out, around two months ago, Lee got half his postdoctoral students on the case. "Everyone got involved. It was good experience and quite a good example of what you can do when everyone comes together."

The technique failed in human cells, so Lee and his team went back to the mouse cells. "That didn't work and then Obokata produced a new protocol because so many people were trying it and there was lots and lots of noise. We were quite fast on that because when it came out we already had the mice in place, the culture mediums and the team had experience because we'd been working on human cells."

With the new protocol intact, the method still failed repeatedly.

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Major stem cell study debunked on scientific social network