Obokata Scandal Puts Research in Peril

TOKYO Front-page headlines, tweets, TV news shows, and tabloids in Japan this week were agog about a Japanese researcher accused of fabricating parts of scientific papers hailed as breakthroughs in stem cell research.

You've probably heard about it. I heard because I happened to be in Japan this week. The Japanese news media's wolfpack instinct of attacking a stray female caught out in the open was remarkable. Everything I despise in the mob mentality of the Japanese press and its audience was on full display.

Still, the story captivated me.

The scientist persecuted in this still-unfolding story is Haruko Obokata of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe. She led a team who reported that a simple acid bath might turn cells in the body into stem cells -- except, not so much.

Haruko Obokata answered questions at a nearly two-hour-long press conference Wednesday in Japan.

Obviously, it's hard for anyone to resist a story about the downfall of a precocious researcher hailed as a national hero only several weeks before. But as it unfolded, the story exposed a number of important issues fundamental to science and the politics of science. Most importantly, it posed questions about the apparent lack of research rigor in Japan.

The journal Nature published the research results in January. Besides the Riken Center, participants in the study included Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School. Shortly after the alleged breakthrough, a flurry of comments questioning whether Obokata was able to replicate the stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) stem cells surfaced in the global scientific community (and the social networks here in Japan).

The suspicion was triggered by Obokata's sloppy methodologies -- some careless, others bordering on unethical. An image showing a genome analysis appeared to have been spliced together. Images of two placentas from two different experiments looked almost identical. Two more images appeared to have been duplicated from Obokata's 2011 doctoral dissertation, even though the study said they were derived from an entirely different experiment.

Obokata's employer, Riken, a semi-governmental research institute, began investigating the matter in March. Last week, it announced that it had found her guilty of fabrication, and it apologized for behavior that had damaged the credibility of Japan's scientific community.

What did the news conference prove? On Wednesday, Obokata held a news conference and apologized for her mistakes, which she said were due to her inexperience. However, she denied that she had acted deliberately.

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Obokata Scandal Puts Research in Peril