SEVEN months ago, Haruko Obokata (pictured) stormed into Japan's public consciousness in a nationally televised press conference in which she claimed a major leap forward in regenerative medicine. This week, visibly thinner and harried-looking, Dr Obokata has been seen rushing past reporters every morning at a research institute in Kobe, where she is desperately trying to save her tattered career.
Dr Obokata led a research unit for cellular programing at the publicly-funded RIKEN Centre for Developmental Biology-an unusually senior position in Japan for a 30-year-old woman. So the news that she had lead-authored two papers in Nature, the British science journal, stunned the nation's crusty academic establishment and made her a star. She claimed she had found a simple way of creating pluripotent stem cells by applying external stresses, such as a bacterial toxin or a weak acid bath, to ordinary mouse cells. Pluripotent stem cells are the predecessors of every other body cell. They interest biologists, as they could be used to investigate diseases and, eventually, to regenerate damaged or missing body parts.
The adulation, however, was short-lived. In February RIKEN, a network of research institutions that are tax-funded to the tune of roughly $1 billion a year, set up an investigative panel after being notified of problems in the Nature papers. Three months later, the panel publicly shamed Dr Obokata, accusing her of fabricating data, doctoring images and plagiarising. A damning report said she lacked ethics and 'integrity and humility as a scientific researcher'.
Dr Obokata admits sloppiness but denies intentionally fabricating data. Still, on July 2nd, Nature formally retracted her two papers. In a bid to put an end to the controversy (some professors still support Dr Obokata's original findings), RIKEN has offered her its facilities in Kobe to reproduce her research.
Such are the stakes in the quest to prove the STAP ('stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency') cells exist, that Dr Obokata will be monitored throughout by video cameras and independent observers. Last month one of her co-authors alleged that Dr Obokata had switched mice in her previous experiments, adding to suspicions that her STAP cells were actually embryonic stem cells.
The frenzy around Dr Obokata's rise and her vertiginous fall continue to reverberate. Japan's top universities are rushing to install anti-plagiarism software and combing through old doctoral theses amid allegations that they too are filled with errors or unreliable research. The affair has dragged in its wake some of Japan's most revered professors, including RIKEN's president, Ryoji Noyori, a Nobel laureate, and Shinya Yamanaka, credited with creating induced pluripotent stem cells.
In April Dr Yamanaka, who is also a Nobel laureate, denied claims that he too had manipulated images in a research paper published in 2000 on embryonic mouse stem cells, but was forced to admit that-like Dr Obokata-he could not find lab notes to support his denial.
The scandal has triggered questions about the quality of advanced science in a country that still punches below its weight in cutting-edge research. Critics say Japan's best universities have churned out hundreds of poor-quality PhDs. Young researchers are not taught to cite data, to question assumptions properly or how to keep detailed lab notes, says Sukeyasu Yamamoto, a former physicist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and now an adviser to RIKEN. 'The problems we see in this episode are all too common,' he says.
Many professors also accuse RIKEN of hanging Dr Obokata out to dry since the problems in her papers were exposed. RIKEN was under intense pressure to justify its budget by publishing papers in high-impact journals. Acknowledging flaws in the supervising process would trigger firings and possible government budget cuts, says Thomas Knopfel, one of the founders of RIKEN's Brain Science Institute, and now a leading neuroscientist at Imperial College London. Dr Obokata could yet silence her critics, and score a remarkable coup for Japanese science, if she manages to reproduce her results. But RIKEN's director , Yoshiki Sasai, says it is difficult to call the STAP phenomenon 'even a promising hypothesis'. Most scientists agree.
(Picture credit: AFP)
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