Senior RIKEN Scientist Involved In Stem Cell Scandal Commits Suicide 127
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Yoshiki Sasai, a noted stem cell scientist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, who co-authored two controversial and later retracted papers that reported a simple way of reprogramming mature cells, was confirmed dead this morning, an apparent suicide. Local media reported he was found hanging from a stairway railing in the RIKEN complex in Kobe. Sasai was rushed to a nearby hospital but efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. He reportedly left a suicide note, but it has not been made public."
Case closed (Score:1)
Because nobody could have possibly wanted this guy dead. Right? Guys?
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Don't rush to crazy conclusions. The person disgraced himself in one of the most prestigious scientific journals. Anytime someone wants to look for his name in scientific literature, there it is.
Some people just can't allow themselves to make mistakes and then accept it for what it is, a mistake.
Don't try to make a hurricane in a teapot.
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He was Japanese - Japanese people are famous for commiting "honor" suicide when being seriously shamed and/or as a way to accept responsibility for a major failure.
So, yes, "case closed"!
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lol ...or, that makes a fine and handy cover story, doesn't it? :D
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I was thinking competitors in the global medical service industry myself.
Re:Case closed (Score:5, Insightful)
0) Labs around the world are researching patentable stem-cell cures at their own expense.
1) Group finds (comparatively) trivial way to produce them and releases said on the internet, encouraging others to try.
2) [Insert unknown]
3) Research is discredited, careers ruined, and dude is dead.
Is '2' something like "research is totally false and harms science itself by its very existence so the villains must be crushed" or more like "research is close enough to scare the shit out of some heavily-invested peers"?
Whichever one it winds up being, the response to 'crappy scientific paper' is NOT typically burning at the stake, so some unknown must be at work here.
Re:Case closed (Score:5, Informative)
It is Japan. People kill themselves on a daily basis there. It is practically a national hobby.
Here is a list of countries by suicide rate [wikipedia.org]. Japan is near the top. Japan's suicide rate is higher than America's suicide rate and murder rate combined.
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Interestingly, the #1 country in that list is Greenland with an average of 83 suicides / 100,000 people / year and the population of Greenland is only 56,968.
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It helps if you remember Iceland is the green one, and Greenland is the icy one...
Greenland is dark and miserable, living conditions for those in rural areas can suck, with few roads, no flushing toilets, barely running water.
Urban life is better, but it's a shock more people don't kill themselves.
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I've always wanted to go, just so I can say I have been. Also, Greenland has quite possibly the coolest flag in the world, next to Nepal.
Also, Iceland is rather icy, especially in the middle. Like greenland.
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I've always wanted to go, just so I can say I have been. Also, Greenland has quite possibly the coolest flag in the world, next to Nepal. Also, Iceland is rather icy, especially in the middle. Like greenland.
If you just want to say that you've been, just say it. Optionally, add " not really". You'll need a better reason to go to physically go, as that involves money, effort and most likely discomfort.
And I reckon Wales has the best flag in the world. It's a &^%$%& Dragon, for god's sake!! How cool is that?
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Also, Greenland has quite possibly the coolest flag in the world, next to Nepal. Also, Iceland is rather icy, especially in the middle. Like greenland.
According to that Wikipedia list [wikipedia.org] (as of now), Greenland has the highest suicide rate while Nepal has the lowest.
Coincidence? I think NOT.
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Suicide is the leading cause of death in men aged 20–44 in Japan.
Wikipeida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
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It's a cultural thing. In the west suicide is still considered a sin by many, due to the influence of Christianity. Remember all the fuss over people who threw themselves from the WTC instead of burning to death?
In Japan suicide is seen as a way to apologise, to avoid being a burden to others or as a legitimate way to end suffering. In the west you have large groups campaigning to force others to keep suffering when afflicted with chronic pain, such is the strength of feeling on the subject.
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In japan IF a is a case is too hard, it's not investigated. This helps maintain a homicide solve rate (90%) with the police.
Re:Case closed (Score:5, Interesting)
There was an article in the New Yorker last year - I wish I could find it - that talked about the enormous about of pressure being put on academic journals that affect big industries. It described cases where Monsanto and another big corporation set out to destroy an otherwise well-respected scientist who discovered a high health risk from one of their products.
The part of the story I found most surprising was not the online stalking, the financial pressure put on the academic departments that these researchers work, or the out-and-out physical threats (pets poisoned after phone threats, etc), but rather that there have been editors of scientific journals who have been pressured to call for retraction of papers that they themselves reviewed positively. The New Yorker writer actually got two of these peer reviewers to admit that they had gotten pressured and one had succumbed to pressure after his fellowship funding was threatened. The company that was trying to cover its ass threatened to pull funding for a new lab at a land grant university if this reviewer didn't call for the paper to be retracted. The guy so much as admitted that the only reason he had called for retraction was the pressure.
When you have billions of dollars on the line, I don't see why anyone would be surprised that there might be people willing to do some very nasty things, up to and including murder. People will kill over a pair of sneakers, I'm pretty sure they'd kill over billions.
I'm a go see if I can find that article.
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I'm a go see if I can find that article.
Any luck?
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Not yet. I'm doing it the hard way, leafing through a pile of old magazines. But you will find a citation in one of the replies to my post that describe a very similar story from the New Yorker, that recounts an industry's effort to discredit a respected (and respectable) researcher because his work points out safety risks with their product.
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When you have billions of dollars on the line, I don't see why anyone would be surprised that there might be people willing to do some very nasty things, up to and including murder. People will kill over a pair of sneakers, I'm pretty sure they'd kill over billions.
I assume the people who deny this fall into three groups:
1) The naive/stupid/hopelessly optimistic
2) Those too afraid to imagine a world where this is a possibility
3) Those who'd rather not awaken groups 1 and 2
Again, in this particular case I have no information to add. Only vague questions. But there probably should be questions due, if not for the general loss of human life, to the billions at stake.
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Here's a link to the article. The case is a little more nuanced, but much of the above reporting is accurate:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/10/a-valuable-reputation
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I'm with you. I don't particularly care about the safety of GMOs, but they seem a lot like a very expensive solution to a problem that Monsanto created (see "Roundup"). That, and the notion of a company - any company - owning intellectual property on a basic foodstuff is nightmarish.
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Wow, thanks for posting that, but believe it or not, it isn't the story I was thinking of. The researcher in the story I'm remembering was a biologist.
My neighbor has a subscription to the New Yorker paper magazine and every couple of months he drops off the read issues by my mailbox because he knows I enjoy them for bathroom reading. I've got a stack going back to January of 2013, so I'm going to see if I can find the story in question.
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The story about Tyrone Hayes (and his persecutors at Syngenta) were in my mind when I read about the court verdict that Dr. Michael Mann's persecutors at the "American Traditions Institute" must pay damages for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
I celebrat
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Apparently Syngenta's corporate shills have mod points.
Re:Case closed (Score:5, Informative)
If there is a comparatively trivial way to produce stem cells THAT ACTUALLY WORKS, people will go heads over tail to do it themselves. I'd assume every lab that is even remotely connected to the stem cell field would set people on replicating this since the method is basically the equivalent of turning lead into gold. It is the holy grail. No matter how much money you have, no matter how much influence you have, you can't contain such a breakthrough, especially not after it's published. That is, if it actually is what it is claimed to be.
On the other hand, if you claim to have made such a breakthrough, everyone tries it out and no one can replicate it, weeeellll, you'll piss a few people off. Considerably more people than when you just say you found that protein X interacts in subcascade Y under conditions Z and it turns out it doesn't after all.
And if serious intentional misconduct is found, the result is burning at stake. I suggest having a look at http://retractionwatch.com/ [retractionwatch.com]
And finally, Sasai wasn't the main author behind the whole thing but rather the seniour guy who slapped his seal of approval on it. So even IF the conspiracy nutjobs were true, it's the wrong man that's dead.
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I work in bioscience too, and this thread is making my head hurt. Anyone who actually follows the biomedical literature would be aware that there's practically an epidemic of shitty papers that should have never been published in the first place, and that many supposedly groundbreaking results have turned out to be impossible to reproduce. And it's not even the first time there's been huge controversy over sketchy stem-cell protocols. For this to be a conspiracy by unnamed entities in the "global medical
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While the papers have been retracted they are still apparently trying to reproduce the results. There seems to be a belief that the technique works, it just wasn't documented properly. Who knows if that is really the case, but the technique hasn't been written off yet.
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"2" is "multiple independent labs fail to reproduce the experiment reported in the paper, which also turns out to have duplicated images in violation of standard publishing practices". Why is this so difficult to understand?
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Re:Case closed (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah, competitors are out to murder their disgraced colleague for all his fame he got from his famously retracted paper. We must be on the right trail, Dr. Holmes.
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Did the disgrace shut him up?
Not rhetorical, I genuinely don't know.
But it stands to reason, in a truth stranger than fiction way, that first you'd discredit, then you'd eliminate. Sort of like how you don't mix bleach and ammonia, but you clean, rinse, clean, rinse until you get it all gone.
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shut him up
I just got the oddest sense of deja vu, like I've had this exact same debate with the exact same presumption of a crazy conspiracy as a baseline for the discussion. Completely different subject, but the exact same argument, at the exact same threading depth. I seem to recall it ending in intransigence on the part of the paranoid party.
It is not "simpler" to concoct an elaborate conspiracy to draw international attention to the subject just before you kill them.
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Crazy conspiracies make more sense than they did fifty years ago.
Especially considering some of the real conspiracies that have been uncovered, starting with Watergate.
We live in a very strange world and money makes people do very strange things.
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Do you know what actual conspiracies have?
Concrete goals with palpable results.
Watergate had political leverage for a national election.
Operation Valkyrie had the goal of removing a racist dictator from office, and protecting the political stability of Germany.
Do you know what conspiracy theories have that mark them as crazy?
Allegations of a widespread and well-covered up plan to achieve a nebulous unstated group who benefits in an abstract matter, by deceiving as large a group of people as possible.
A "stra
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Is this real enough for you?
http://www.who.int/trade/gloss... [who.int]
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Hey, look. A major industry exists.
For a more important question that actually having this debate, since like I said, intransigence, do you know how crazy you are, or do you think that you're exceptionally insightful and have stumbled, through reading an articles' summary, upon a grand and important conspiracy with unspecified ends, that just happens to need this researcher, in particular, dead?
I mean, what degree of self awareness do your kind have?
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Oh noez, insults on the internet? Whatever shall I do?
Oh that's right, ignore them.
Carry on, then...
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I wonder how many real conspiracies with concrete goals have been ignored because of the term "conspiracy theory". It's a great way to end discussion. You just say "conspiracy theory" and everybody has to shut up.
As you can see from someone's post above regarding the New Yorker story, there are conspiracies that exist to discredit good researchers and good research. And apropos to BobMcD's post, the pharmaceutical industry has been one of the main perpetrators.
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No, this isn't an insult. Do you know you're crazy or not?
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As you can see from someone's post above regarding the New Yorker story, there are conspiracies that exist to discredit good researchers and good research. And apropos to BobMcD's post, the pharmaceutical industry has been one of the main perpetrators.
I read the New Yorker story, and while the behavior it describes is sleazy and unethical, it was also done semi-openly (and somewhat sloppily) and completely failed to silence the principal target. It did not involve taking over an entire field and convincing
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i think you meant "paranoid ideation stranger than truth".
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Keep on supporting irreproducible science and loony conspiracy theories.
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Oh, please. Maas Biolabs would never conduct such a sloppy wetworks. Their general operating policy is abduction and indoctrination of the talent. In extremely rare cases, termination followed by cryonic preservation of the cortex prior to neural "biosoft" imprinting is acceptable as well, but don't expect any surviving witnesses in either case. Often, they use localized airburst toxins or a satellite projectile to zero out the target area. If the situation permits, venting of a military hallucinogenic/seda
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Fetal stem cells. FETAL.
F E T A L
That is spelled
F
E
T
A
L
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Oh, come on, what are the chances that the kid would have grown up to be more useful than its harvested biomaterial? Pretty low if you ask me, especially if the stem cell therapy is expensive. I just hope the aborting mother gets market value for her labor (no pun intended) and goods.
And sometimes you even get a marketable biotech product [forbes.com] out of it. Would you rather have 113 patents [wikipedia.org], or a useless infant? I know which one I'd pick.
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That's an odd way to spell "embryonic." You do know it's taken from a simple ball of a few cells, right? It doesn't work like in the South Park episode about Christopher Reeve.
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Sure, but the point is: the American religious never objected to stem cell research in general, only quite specifically to embryonic stem cell stuff. And, really, it is a bit creepy, and I think it's great that it's starting to look like embryonic stem cells aren't all that important to the field after all, and maybe humanity can give that particular sort of creepiness a miss (imagine e.g. a situation where the only way to get a cure for your illness was to conceive an embryo for harvest - just so many ki
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Certainly more appropriate then fecal stem cells.
Re:Case closed (Score:5, Insightful)
Except his research was on using adult stem cells, so it is unlikely he would have triggered the angst of religious or abortion groups.
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Not everyone bothers with these distinctions. To say that the debate is one rife with ignorance is to master the skill of understatement.
Re:Case closed (Score:5, Informative)
Not everyone bothers with these distinctions. To say that the debate is one rife with ignorance is to master the skill of understatement.
It's not the religious fundamentalist groups that are the ones that typically purposefully conflate the two.
Re:Case closed (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone bothers with these distinctions. To say that the debate is one rife with ignorance is to master the skill of understatement.
Religious people were against stem cells from aborted fetuses because they considered it murder. There is nothing hard to understand about this.
Therefore, a way to do this with adult (or any non-abortion-based cells) would be hailed by the religious.
You should learn what people claim before drawing conclusions. As with the Hobby Lobby argument, stopping implantation might not technically be an "abortion", but it is killing a viable embryo nevertheless, "ensouled", so to speak. People stop being facetious.
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Those folks start their day with angst and a sense of martyrdom. Who can say what's going to set them off?
Plus, I doubt religious freaks had anything to do with this. If it was murder (a big "if"), then it's more likely there was money involved than religious fervor. The people that will kill in the name of "pro-life" are not likely to be able to track down a researcher and travel internationally and then set up a phony accident. They'd be more likely to just walk into a church during mass and blow a do
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Wow. What socratic drivel. Your condescending bigotry of ideals you don't personally hold make you the least likely person to predict how "religious freaks" may or may not behave or operate. Unbeknownst to you, there's a LOT of those religious freaks who don't require a dribble cup and a handler.
If we're going with nutcase stereotypes, we might as well trot out the theory the poor guy came to the realization that he's just a higher order of jellyfish with no purpose while experiencing a bad sugar crash, or
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Most likely was just plain suicide. Right or wrong, Japanese culture has people feel and take much more responsibility for failures. It's all about honor.
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You are assuming that these groups are logical.
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No, you misunderstood my post, to say the least. I was alleging a substantial separation from any sort of politicized violence the GP was implying.
As to the rest of your post, you're taking that rather substantial misunderstanding and running pretty crazy with it. We can talk about the dozen or so actual murders performed specifically in the name of "pro life" ideology if you want. But if we did, it would a red herring and unrelated to my post.
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Justify bringing them up in a discussion about a disgraced japanese scientist killing himself. ... or concede.
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Because the OP alleged motivated murder, and that was the most plausibly motivated group, while still being insane to allege.
Now, you can stop being insane too, or we can go down a rabbit hole where you pretend that there's no reason to assume the OP meant that because nobody could ever mean that. You'll know you're lying, I'll know you're lying, and people reading will know you're lying, but at least you'll have saved face by not admitting that relatively plausible explanation.
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How many American evangelicals have gone over seas to murder scientists for abortion reasons.
Zero.
Do religious crazies sometimes do nutty stuff? Obviously... we're dealing with it all the time. That said, the danger posed by christian fundamentalists from the US is quite small. Its mostly passed around these days to their various factional enemies appear more reasonable by comparison.
Appreciate... I'm not even a christian. I just find this reflexive bigotry to be both offensive and dangerous. The real threa
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Okay, so rabbit hole it is.
You know you're lying. I know you're lying. I'm done with the conversation.
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Denial is not an argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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No, but argument is reserved for the intellectually honest.
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A statement you can make in any situation and scuttle away so long as you don't have to substantiate it. And you didn't... so this is apparently your universal escape ploy, eh?
Fine. I accept your forfeiture. Better luck next time.
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Not over a sea, but there's a reasonable chance James Kopp went to Canada to murder doctors for abortion reasons.
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You're ignoring the point that the research the scientist said he was working on would have made fetal stem cells unnecessary.
As such, this guy is if anything liked by the anti abortion people.
Ultimately, the reference to the evangelicals was just a stupid cheap shot that did little more then reveal casual bigotry.
You can admit that can carry on or persist in this farce that you had any deeper point.
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I'm ignoring everything except the one claim I was replying to - it seems possible there that your claim of zero isn't true.
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Show one example where it ever happened.
It is zero. And your evasions, lack of intellectual integrity, and outright cowardice in this matter have been noted.
By all means... scuttle away. Your concession is accepted.
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I gave an example where it might have happened. Which is all I know of. I don't have the crystal ball you must have to know it is exactly zero.
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Fine... to that I counter that we should actually be worried about space beavers from mars raping fastfood workers.
Its never happened before... but there is my made up example of it happening.
Equally valid.
Kindly provide a basis for taking your point seriously or I get to cite space beavers... and anything else.
Re: Case closed (Score:2)
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Really? Then tell me about the evangelicals that fly around the world assassinating scientists and making it look like a suicide.
Or you're both morons.
It wasn't his fault (Score:5, Interesting)
The article makes it seem like the retracted Nature articles were why he committed suicide (or a major contributor to it).. but they weren't really his fault. Haruko Obokata was the lead researcher on those, and also the person responsible for fabricating the research results. Sure, his name was on it as a co-author, but that sounds more like the result of office politics than actually believing what she was publishing. Even his employer seemed like they held him in high regard after the scandal broke.
Sucks to see a man driven to suicide by something he didn't do.
Re:It wasn't his fault (Score:5, Interesting)
They haven't released the note, that makes assessing the motivations impractical.
they will not release the note (Score:1)
Especially in a country like Japan where suicide is a huge problem, the note's contents will never be released.
Reporting on suicide has serious ethical consequences, and revealing the contents of the note means others will see suicide as a valid way to bring their ideas, grievances, or innocence to public light.
In most cases suicides are not reported, and even if they are newsworthy, generally the suicide nature is downplayed as much as possible.
It's one of those really sucky problems that's hard to deal wi
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He's the senior researcher _and_ was ready to take credit.
Even if he knew nothing of the fraud, it was partly his job to prevent it.
Re:It wasn't his fault (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, his name was on it as a co-author, but that sounds more like the result of office politics than actually believing what she was publishing. Even his employer seemed like they held him in high regard after the scandal broke.
It was a bit more than that. He recruited Obokata to RIKEN, was her mentor, and supervised her STAP work. As you said, there is not even the slightest hint that he was engaged in any misconduct, but the RIKEN investigation did find that Sasai and Wakayama carried “heavy responsibility” for what happened, and the incident opened questions about how closely co-authors and research advisers should oversee the work of their underlings.
In Western Culture, It wasn't his fault (Score:2)
When one is "responsible" for something, even if one wasn't directly involved with the failure, the failure is attributed to EVERYONE responsible and is a major loss of "Face". It's especially bad in this case since it wasn't just an error, it was a planned deception by the lead researcher. So every project this person is associated with will now be "tainted"... (yeah, a bit different than Western culture) so pretty much his career w
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------ Wooooossshhh! ---> /| /\
_
o/
seppuku / sudoku
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Even if it was not his fault, it was his responsibility. If you accept a senior-author position on a paper, then you have responsibility for the scientific integrity. You also accept the impact factor very willingly.
That does by no way mean that your career should be completely over after one mistake happening under your supervision.Let alone that, a society in which one mistake after a very sucessful and long scientific career pressures a man to kill himself should strongly question its own standards in de
Sad (Score:2)
My heart goes out to his relatives. People get so caught up in their public persona, they often forget that they could lead a fantastic life in obscurity after a major failure like this. I live in obscurity every day! It's great!
Last week I had a cousin make an attempt with a bunch of pills. Rather than hospitalize him, the police took him to jail for possession where he promptly finished the job with a belt. I didn't know him really well so I'm not all torn up but some in my family are. This is an entirely
Clone him (Score:1)
And put his clone on trial.
There is a lot of pressure on scientists (Score:2)
And publish or perish has an even deeper meaning in many Asian countries.
Both the pressure to release things before they are fully proven.
And the pressure to always succeed no matter the costs.
The lack of critiques by junior scientists involved in the institutions and labs involved is another cause of these distorted results.
One of the first thing scientists from Asian countries learn when they work in US labs is that they are expected to critique and question senior scientists, which is regarded as Not Don
Doh! (Score:2)
Welcome to another episode... (Score:1)