From stem cells to physics fraudulent science results are plenty but hard to find

Haruko Obokata at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, claimed to have discovered an easy and straightforward way to reprogramme adult cells to become stem cells.

Soon after publication in "Nature" in January, problems and accusations arose with fellow scientists saying they could not replicate the results. Obokata was accused of having plagiarized passages of text and of having used duplicated images.

The Riken Research Center urged her to retract the papers. Obokata refused - until this week.

No surprise

"Couldn't we see that this news would follow when we first read the news of the discovery?" a reader writes in a forum at German news magazine "Spiegel Online."

Indeed: the results were too good to be true.

Especially where stem cells are concerned, sudden miracles tend to fall flat when they are checked rigorously by peers.

Cloning specialist Hwang Woo-suk fabricated results

The story of South Korean veterinarian Hwang Woo-suk is similar. In 2006 he claimed to have created human embryonic stem cells by cloning, but was later dismissed from Seoul National University when it was revealed that he had faked his results.

And in the field of physics, a German researcher called Jan Hendrik Schn became prominent with his groundbreaking experiments on semiconductors, until 2002 when it turned out his results were a fraud.

View post:
From stem cells to physics fraudulent science results are plenty but hard to find