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A researcher embroiled in a fabrication scandal that rocked Japan's scientific establishment may face possible criminal charges for falsifying images on her STAP cell research.
The researcher, Haruko Obokata, resigned from the Japanese government-affiliated research institute Riken last December after she failed to reproduce results of what was once billed as a ground-breaking study on stem cells.
Riken said Tuesday it is considering filing a criminal complaint against Obokata and also demanding she return research funds to the institute.
Last January, Riken trumpeted Obokata's simple method to reprogram adult cells to work like stem cells -- precursors that are capable of developing into any other cell in the human body.
Her work was published in the international journal Nature. The study was top news in Japan, where the Harvard-trained Obokata became a phenomenon.
But media attention soon grew into skepticism as doubts emerged about her papers on Stimulus-Triggered Acquisition of Pluripotency (STAP).
Mistakes were discovered in some data published in two papers, photograph captions were found to be misleading, and the work itself could not be repeated by other scientists, leading to accusations the data had been doctored.
Obokata, who asserted that she created STAP cells some 200 times, tried since July, in tandem with independent teams, to reproduce her own results. She claimed there was a secret technique for creating STAP cells, but refused to publicise it, asserting it is a subject of her future papers.
The Britain-based Nature withdrew the flawed study after Obokata agreed in June to retract the papers.
As the scandal deepened, Obokata's mentor and co-author, stem cell scientist Yoshiki Sasai, hanged himself, further shaking Japan's scientific establishment.
Riken has pledged to restructure its Center for Developmental Biology where the scandal took place.
© Japan Today/AFP
35 Comments
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smithinjapan
Just a show to cover their own butts when THEY are the ones responsible for the ultimate publication and promotion of her work. If anyone should be sued or face charges, it's them.
3RENSHO
A subtle form of blackmailing her -- return all research funding or face criminal charges...
Himajin
smithinjapan, should they have to perform DNA tests on all their researchers' cell lines each time a paper is published, to make sure the person is not cheating? It's a level of deception that is beyond the normal vetting process. it was not accidental, she had to combine two cell lines, it was deliberate. It would be quite ridiculous of they had to check every paper of people at her level to make sure that passages haven't been copied from books, that cell lines haven't been mixed, and illustrations haven't been cooked. There's a certain level of accountability that is expected of employees, and she betrayed it at every turn.
Thunderbird2
I can see this unfortunate young lady taking her own life :(
chtsai
I agree with Himajin. The authors of a paper are solely responsible for the accuracy of their paper's contents. People may make unintended mistakes, which are excusable. However the act is not forgivable, when the authors tried to present false data.
kwatt
Her case is already closed. She was resigned. Why is Riken still looking for more responsibilities after that. It seems that Riken has more responsibilities than Obokata as Riken professors could not find her fabrifications before major publication and it did let her spend a lot of taxpayers money for the new discovery.
wildwest
Let sleeping dogs lie. Enough is engough, If this must go on then do it in private, no one wants to see (any more of) the UNIs dirty washing.
igloobuyer
That poor girl, she's hardly a criminal, just a naive and perhaps disingenuous person.
Jandworld
Did it rock the perfect, the impecable,
The uber human?
scoobydoo
Shame on you Riken and also the Co-authours, talk about being a scape goat
smithinjapan
Himajin and Chris: So, if the writer is solely responsible, why should Riken and other companies profit from the writings when they are not fake, and why do they take credit for them, as Riken did quite a lot when the news first came out?
Sorry, guys, but yes, they are responsible. It is the same with a regular publishing company. A writer can be questioned for his or her views via the material, and the public can call them out on plagiarism and what have you, but the publisher is ultimately responsible for giving it the go-ahead to be published. I'm not saying that Obukata doesn't take any of the blame at all -- she does, and I agree that she deliberately lied -- but no one checked into it before making what they claimed would be a world-altering discovery, and that is the company's fault. They take just as much blame, if not more, than she, so they should also be facing criminal charges if anyone is.
lucabrasi
How can a company file criminal charges?
Surely that's the role of state prosecutors alone.
nath
It says they are considering a criminal complaint, not charges.
lucabrasi
@Strangerland
You're right, thanks. Glad somebody can read!
UK9393
Shysters. Leave her alone and TAKE some responsibility... oh, wait a second. It's Japan, man. QED.
TrevorPeace1
Leave her alone, Riken. She's paid her price.
Salvor Hardin
Maybe we could roll this into a class-action lawsuit against a whole bunch of Japanese fibbers all at once?
Let's see...how about 1.) Obokata for her fake stem cells and plagiarized "evidence" 2.) Mamoru Samuragochi, once hyped as "Japan's Beethoven," who didn't actually write his own music and even lied about being blind, 3.) Ryutaro Nonomura, whose pathetic bawling tantrum of fake contrition when caught misappropriating public money fooled exactly no one, and finally 4.) Naoya Tomita, the swimmer who admitted stealing a camera from a swimming competition sidelines but then abruptly changed his tune and said his taped confession was actually false!
Off with their heads!!! I'll even throw in the serial "misrememberer" Brian Williams if that'll sweeten the deal for you....
bjohnson23
these cowards, leave the poor girl alone, she's been through enough, rather than discouraging her, do the opposite, encourage her to do better next time and not give up. At least she had the guts to stand up to the system and try. So it failed big deal, sometimes success comes with a price, I hope some big pharma out there has guts enough to offer her a job in R/D, the world needs RD people.
lostrune2
They just want her to put out or risk further shame!
GW
What a JOKE!
If riken had properly vetted this research then it would have been found to have problems, BUT THEY DID NOT! They ^&%^^&&^ed up! BIGTIME. Yes Obokata is responsible as well............obviously.
But I think now the best thing for riken is to STFU! How can they be so stupid................well I guess its to be expected
What a sad pathetic mess all round, way to go Japan for dragging this out & making yourself look daft.
SUGGESTION: cut your losses & try to LEARN from this, just an idea, but hey your free to ignore
kaynide
...yeah gotta agree with Smith here: Riken should be more responsible for checking their stuff before it goes out public. If they're going to share in the victories they need to share the defeats as well.
Frungy
Okay, obviously you're not an academic. The publisher here is not the academic, nor the university, but actually Nature, the journal in which the material was published.
Academics do NOT go to the administration departments of their universities for permission to publish (the administrative staff wouldn't have a clue how to read it).
They do generally have to run the experimental design past the ethics committee, but not the results (unless they're ethically worrying).
They do not even have to consult their colleagues, although in this case Obokata did so, and the colleagues who accepted co-authorship did not do due diligence.
Who does check academic papers? The journal (in this case Nature) appoints two or more reviewers, experts in the subject area responsible for giving the paper a thorough checking before publication - a process that can take upward of 6 months. This is the famed "peer review".
There is no "company" here. And I agree that Obokata isn't solely responsible, her co-authors should take an equal portion of the blame.
However I am not convinced that Obokata deliberately falsified her results. She would have known that other researchers would try to replicate her findings. With a discovery this big there would be legions of researchers looking to replicate and improve on her technique. Especially since her technique is so quick and easy.
Discovery was inevitable and no sane researcher would throw away their career like this. This leaves two possible conclusions:
Obokata is insane, perhaps a compulsive liar, and needs treatment, but not crimnal prosecution.
Obokata did indeed perform the experiment and get the results she claimed, but there was some equipment or sample contamination that enabled those results with that specific equipment/samples, in which case there was no deliberate deceit and she is not guilty of anything crimnal.Either way I can't see Obokata as a criminal in this case.
Himajin
The hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent on funding faked research?
They pay up front to fund the research, it's about profit...they don't throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at researchers out of the goodness of their hearts, it's a business. Of course they are going to profit, and of course they are going to take action when someone uses research grants on sloppy/faked/false research.
I'm sorry, but companies should not have to follow their employees around like 3-year-olds to make sure that they follow basic ethical rules that should be ingrained after years in the field. Faking research, plagiarizing, copying etc are violations of BASIC ethics that any human being should know are wrong without their employer breathing down their neck with invasive checks.
Frungy-
I wouldn't say 'insane', perhaps narcissistic, believing that she's SO much smarter than anyone else that they'll never catch it, or as you say, a compulsive liar. Her PhD paper had sections copied verbatim from books and internet sites. She's a very blatant cheater.
Can the lab be so sloppy that equipment contamination caused combination of two completely different cell lines? If so it's horrible, and in it's way just as bad, as she was head of her team. Either way she is responsible, either for faking or keeping the lab so disorganized that results were skewed. Whether she violated laws or not is for the experts :-D
Frungy
I really wish people would stop going on about this. I've looked at the sections copied and they're not important. There's a line here and there that she may have copied, and the vast majority of the so-called "plagiarism" is not actually plagiarism, it is formulaic stuff that is the same in virtually every thesis. This is the problem with the press, they run someone's thesis through an online "plagiarism detector" and then go to press without understanding that some bits of every thesis are the same.
The bottom line with the PhD is that while some bits are copied they're not at all important.
First, she wasn't the head of her team. She did the research and other (more senior) academics jumped on the bandwagon when word got out that she had discovered something important - and given the way that Japanese academia works she couldn't refuse them. If anything she was the most junior member of the team.
As for lab work, it is entirely possible for a single lab's equipment and samples to be contaminated. A colleague of mine came back from the weekend to find weird results in an experiment because one of the cleaners came in and washed the floor of the lab with an ammonia-based solution, which then vaporised and contaminated all the samples. Another colleague of mine went to sleep for 2 hours while running a 2 day experiment and found his experiment results were all over the place because the power went out for 30 minutes while he was sleeping - but he didn't know this and it took 3 days before someone mentioned the power outage in casual conversation and he was able to solve the mystery. Yet another colleague came back from leave to find that all his experiments were giving different results because they had serviced his centrifuge - it had developed a slight wobble that invalidated 6 months of work before he had gone on leave. My new personal favorite is one that happened just last week. One of the profs told some students to do a dissection and the students got left and right mixed up (yes, this happened!) and they dissected ten mice that were part of a control for year-long anti-cancer drug study. ... the professor now has to re-do a year of work because he no longer has a control group.
Lab work is incredibly sensitive. Any real scientist will tell you this and be able to add their own stories of hundreds of tiny changes that messed up days, weeks or months of experimentation.
This is something that non-scientists can't seem to grasp. Hollywood has fed people images of scientists with private high-tech labs with key-carded doors and pristine shining white surfaces. In reality most University scientists share labs with other academics and students, the equipment is aging, often contaminated by other people who were too lazy or too incompetent to clean it properly, etc.
The real world of science is very different from what Hollywood feeds the public.
Himajin
NHK said whole sections were copied.
The news kept caller her 'team leader' or something like that (can't remember the exact phrase at the moment).
How horrible! Well, then, why was the lab not checked out? I'm not being flippant, I wonder why that wasn't taken into consideration. Nothing like that ever happened to my husband in all his years in the lab, so I find it surprising that it's that common.
rickyvee
why are people still defending obokata like she's some martyr? she continued to deny that her "discovery" was either falsified or a result of contamination. as frungy mentioned above, she is either delusional or had some serious issues with quality control. regardless, riken should exact as much blood out of her as possible for what she put them through.
Frungy
Like most media reports this is technically correct and entirely misleading. A "section" could be one subheading, e.g. 2.5.1.1.3 is a "section" ... even if it is just one paragraph.
In a lot of academic writing there are certain set phrases that are used by everyone, and only so many ways to write stuff like, "The experiments were completed according to the protocols set out in the methodology section". Likewise the first about 3 pages are all pretty much 100% according to a set form with only very minor variations.
Possibly the phrase they used was, "lead author" or "primary contributor"? That just means her name comes first in the list of authors on the paper. It is an honor accorded for a variety of reasons, many of them having to do with office and institutional politics, and isn't always a sign that the "lead author" actually led anything.
Ask him again. He might not have mentioned it, but I have yet to find a scientist who doesn't have at least one or two horror stories about malfunctioning equipment giving false results, people messing with their stuff, substandard chemicals ordered from dodgy suppliers, etc.
And as for checking the lab, how would anyone necessarily know? Let's take a situation a friend of mine had. He tests genetic samples for paternity suits in a private lab. His lab is his own and nobody messes with it. Ideal situation, right? Well, he went on 2 weeks leave, and when he got back he was getting strange results from his sequencing equipment. What had happened? When he was on leave they had ordered routine maintenance. No problem, this happened regularly every 2 months. But he was on leave and the technician replaced some glass tubes with plastic ones (the glass ones were much more expensive and the technician thought he was doing them a favor). In most machines this wouldn't be a problem, and with most software it wouldn't be a problem, but with this particular machine running this particular software package it produced a mass of strange results. My friend was at a total loss and couldn't work for nearly 2 weeks while a new machine was ordered from Germany. It wasn't until 2 months later that the technician came in, noted the glass tubes and offered to replace them "Like I did last time" that the mystery was solved.
And this is what gets me about the simplistic way this entire thing has played out. Science is hellishly complicated. It isn't simple, not when you're dealing with things like computers. Find me anyone prepared to swear that their computer has never manifested a mysterious bug. You can't, because machines are buggy. Now imagine working in a lab with things a 1000 times more complicated than your home computer.
Himajin
I found it- '研究ユニットリーダー' research unit leader. I couldn't recall it.
I feel bad for your friend!
Oh, I agree with you. I thought of accidental contamination right away, but anyone I mentioned it to pooh-pooh'd it. Following the news as well, you begin to think you might be mistaken...her boss committing suicide, again, made me think there was something afoot.
Frungy
She definitely wasn't the research unit leader. Obokata was working with at least Nobel nominee and was a very junior member of staff. I think that NHK may have made a mistake.
Or it could just be a case of the Japanese famous "rotating department head", which is fairly normal because the title "department head" doesn't carry much in the way of extra pay and is a massive amount of extra paperwork and dealing with administration, so it is a game of hot potato.
It happens a lot, I could give you dozens more similar stories from myself and others.
Personally the more I read the news the more I was convinced it was an overly simplistic handling of a very complex situation, with the media keen to find a clear "villain" to form the centerpiece of their narrative.
Himajin
She was referred to as such in the initial press conference when they announced the research, and she was referred to as such through al subsequent newscasts, on several channels. I suppose one news agency started it and they all followed suit.
English Wiki lists her as "Haruko Obokata is a Japanese former stem-cell biologist and the former Research Unit Leader of the Laboratory for Cellular Reprogramming at RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology" as does the Japanese site.
I just looked at 4-5 Japanese newspaper/magazine sites, and they all list her as 研究ユニットリーダー, every last one of them. I have to wonder what kind of position it was...it sounds as if she had responsibility, perhaps not.
slumdog
Himajin,
I agree that her title has been consistently reported in the media and by Rikken itself as unit leader.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/people/AJ201401300073
Frungy
I suspect it is much like the title of "Vice President" in many U.S. companies. It sounds good but is absolutely meaningless.
slumdog
Your suspicions, and misunderstandings, of the role of vice presidents in US companies aside, you wrote a couple of posts right above here that 'She definitely wasn't the research unit leader.' You have been shown in various ways that she was in fact research unit leader. Why not admit you were mistaken?
turbotsat
That's pretty fishy, right there. Especially after they gave her use of a lab and months to reproduce her research, and she couldn't.
Riken has its own problems, with lab mice mislabelling, if I recall correctly (they produce genetic lines of lab mice they sell/provide to other labs). One wonders if they'd have been public with that one, if not forced to.
There was an article recently in one of the popular science magazines, about widespread contamination/mislabelling of cell lines between labs, and how a lot of scientists just wished the problem would go away quietly, rather than publicly invalidate their own research.
beowulf
Given how often dubious results are discovered in science papers I find a criminal complaint against Obakata to be beyond the pale.
Science has this specious image of truth and uncompromising research, but it is pretty much like any other industry where there are a lot of people who are willing to do almost anything to get ahead. Getting published in an important science journal is necessary to get ahead these days. Retractions have also been on the rise for the last decade and the main reason for those retractions comes from poor ethical judgements.