#riken cdb

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STAP Voted as the Stem Cell Story of the Year for 2014

STAP Voted as the Stem Cell Story of the Year for 2014

When I asked the readers of this blog what they felt was the biggest stem cell story of 2014 in a poll, they overwhelmingly picked the STAP cell scandal.

For background on STAP you can toggle through the many STAP cell pieces on this blog here, see a STAP timeline, and a STAP image gallery.

Basically, STAP was a bogus scientific claim about a supposedly simple reprogramming method to make…

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Rejected "Magical" STAP papers were blistered by Nature's own reviewers, but then accepted just months later

Rejected “Magical” STAP papers were blistered by Nature’s own reviewers, but then accepted just months later

The reviews of a STAP paper submitted to and rejected by the journal Science in 2012, were posted at Retraction Watch yesterday. They filled in some gaps in the puzzle of the series of events that led to such flawed science being published in Nature in January 2014, but the reviews also raised more questions.

Today, more STAP paper reviews have surfaced.

ScienceInsider posted a piece with…

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Full Reviews of Rejected STAP Paper Point to Early Signs of Big Trouble

Full Reviews of Rejected STAP Paper Point to Early Signs of Big Trouble

Before the two STAP cell papers were published in Nature in January of 2014, much of the same data was reportedly submitted as single papers to other high-profile journals including Science.

In these cases, the proto-STAP papers as we might call them were rejected.

But why?

Until now we largely could only speculate.

However, the reviews of the 2012 proto-STAP manuscript at Science can now be read

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Holding Institutions Responsible for Research Misconduct: the recent case of a death of stem cell scientist

Holding Institutions Responsible for Research Misconduct: the recent case of a death of stem cell scientist

By Zubin Master

Scientist Yoshiki Sasai, age 52, committed suicide and was found dead on August 5, 2014. Sasai was deputy director of the Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) at RIKEN in Kobe, Japan, and coauthor on two recently retracted Nature papers about a reportedly easier way to make induced pluripotent stem cells. The papers were retracted due to duplication and manipulation of images…

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Perspectives: RIKEN itself fails to reproduce STAP & big CDB shake up expected soon

Perspectives: RIKEN itself fails to reproduce STAP & big CDB shake up expected soon

Nikkei is reporting that the RIKEN internal attempt to replicate so-called STAP (acid bath) cells has failed.

The rumors for weeks in the stem cell gapevine that RIKEN itself could not get STAP to work, even with the help of Dr. Haruko Obokata, have been confirmed by Nikkei. Obokata was first author on both Nature STAP papers, which were retracted. One of Obokata’s mentors and a STAP paper…

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Want to go the links associated with specific images? Click on thumbnails with embedded links below.

STAP Cell Image Gallery With Links Want to go the links associated with specific images? Click on thumbnails with embedded links below.

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STAP Cell Chatter From ISSCR Meeting

STAP Cell Chatter From ISSCR Meeting

What were people saying about STAP cells at the ISSCR 2014 meeting?

It was a tale of two meetings when it came to STAP at ISSCR.

Officially, bigwigs at the podiums only briefly mentioned it and they seemed to collectively argue that STAP was something unfortunate, but that the bigger danger was the overreaction to it.

Thus, remarkably their key concern seemed to be their perception of an…

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