http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9162046c-ab65-11e3-8cae-00144feab7de.html#axzz2vxKiwLdl
Japanese stem cell scientists prepare to withdraw research
By Jonathan Soble in Tokyo
The Japanese scientists behind a potentially revolutionary new technique for producing stem cells are preparing to retract a widely hailed paper on the subject after confirming “inappropriate points” in the research including what appears to be false photographic evidence.
Ryoji Noyori, a Nobel laureate and president of the Riken science institute, bowed deeply at a news conference and apologised for what he called “sloppy” work by the authors of the paper, which was published in Nature, the scientific journal, in January and seemed to demonstrate a remarkably simple method of making the embryo-like cells.
“I am sorry that we created a situation that is bound to shake trust in the scientific community,” he said.
His words were echoed by the paper’s 30-year-old lead author, Haruko Obokata, who did not appear at the news conference and was said by one Riken director to be in “poor” psychological health. She said in a statement: “I am taking the many critiques seriously and deeply apologise for causing confusion.”
A cloud of doubt now hangs over the technique described by Ms Obokata and her co-authors, five Japanese and two Americans, which involves exposing blood cells briefly to dilute acid. Stem cells have enormous potential in treating diseases because of their ability to grow into any sort of tissue, but scientists are only beginning to find ways of deriving them without extracting them from human embryos.
Riken executives said their re-examination of the research was continuing and that, so far, they had found no reason to conclude that its fundamental claims were false. But Maki Kawai, a Riken director, acknowledged that an initially forceful defence of those claims made by Riken when it began its investigation in February now looked “too optimistic”.
Masatoshi Takeichi, the head of Riken’s centre for developmental biology, where Ms Obokata works, said he wanted the Nature paper retracted but that first all its co-authors would have to agree. At least one, Charles Vacanti, an anaesthetist at Harvard medical school, has publicly defended its conclusions, telling Nature that problems with photographs amounted to an “honest mistake [that] did not affect any of the data, the conclusions or any other component of the paper”.
Some outside experts have questioned the research, however. Kenneth Lee, a professor of regenerative medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said he had been unable to create stem cells by following the paper’s acid-bath formula, called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP. Another scientist, Paul Knoepfler of the University of California, Davis, has pointed to what he says are inconsistencies between the procedures outlined in the Nature paper and follow-up technical guidelines issued by the authors.
Riken said its examination had found that pictures of what were supposedly stem cells created by the STAP procedure were “unnaturally similar” to photos of cells from a different experiment that appeared in Ms Obokata’s doctoral dissertation, and were probably the same photographs. It is also looking into allegations that portions of the Nature paper and the dissertation were copied from other researchers.
Friday’s news conference lasted for four hours and was attended by more than 100 journalists, underscoring what has been intense interest in the controversy in Japan, where stem cell science has taken on the contours of a national industry. Shinya Yamanaka, a researcher at Kyoto university, shared a Nobel Prize in 2012 for discovering what was – and may still be, if the Riken team’s conclusions prove false – the only method of converting adult cells into stem cells, by treating them with a biochemical and genetic cocktail.