Stem-cell Scientist Found Guilty of Misconduct

A Japanese researcher stands by her claim to be able to produce stem cells using an acid bath or mechanical stress

A mouse embryo injected with cells made pluripotent through stress, tagged with a fluorescent protein. Credit:Haruko Obokata

A committee investigating problems in papers claiming a method to apply stress to create embryonic like cells has found the lead researcher guilty of scientific misconduct.

The judgement is the latest twist but not the final word in the bizarre story of stimulus-triggered activation of pluripotency (STAP), a method that researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, still say is able to turn ordinary mature mouse cells into cells that share embryonic stem cells' capacity to turn into all of the bodys cells.

The technology waspresented in twoNaturepapers,on 30 January by the CDBs Haruko Obokata together with colleagues in Japan and the United States, buta slew of problems has been identifiedsince then. (Natures news and comment team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.)

A six-person committee three RIKEN scientists, two university researchers and a lawyer looked at six problems. Four were dismissed as innocent errors, but in two cases the committee found that Obokata had manipulated data in an intentionally misleading fashion. They branded it scientific misconduct.

Image confusion Obokata did not appear at the press conference where the committee announced its results this morning or at an afternoon press conference where RIKEN management, led by director Ryoji Noyori, gave RIKEN's response. But in a written statement, Obokata said she planned to appeal the judgement.

One problem concerned a figure showing electrophoresis gels. One lane in a diagram had been swapped for another. Obokata says that she made the switch because the other lane was clearer and she did not think it a problem. The committee found the swap to be intentionally misleading manipulation.

The committee also condemned Obokatas use of an image from her doctoral thesis, in which the image, of a type of tumour called a teratoma, had been used to show the broad-ranging developmental capacity of cells she made by putting pressure on the cell membranes using a pipette. The image in theNaturepaper was meant to show the same developmental capacity, but those cells were said to be made by stressing the cells with acid. Obokata said that she mistakenly added the wrong image. But the committee, noting that captions on the image had been changed, judged it to be fraudulent.

The committee repeatedly fended off questions about whether the technology works and, thus, whether STAP cells actually exist. That is beyond the scope of our investigation, said committee chair Shunsuke Ishii, a molecular biologist at RIKEN in Tsukuba, Japan.

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Stem-cell Scientist Found Guilty of Misconduct