

Stem-cell scientist found guilty of misconduct - sizzle
http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-scientist-found-guilty-of-misconduct-1.14974

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kevinwuhoo
The response from the scientific community about this paper has been
unbelievable. PubPeer has had a really great summary (by scientists) of
critiques about this original paper. [1] Paul Knoepfler, an active science
blogger and professor at UC Davis that runs a lab that studies stem cells,
crowdsourced data from many people who have (unsuccessfully) attempted to
repeat the this experiment. [2, 3] I'm really impressed at the speed at which
all this happened, especially in comparison to that arsenic-based DNA
bacterium debacle which was published in Dec 2010 and found to be false in Oct
2012. [4]

[1]:
[https://pubpeer.com/publications/8B755710BADFE6FB0A848A44B70...](https://pubpeer.com/publications/8B755710BADFE6FB0A848A44B70F7D)

[2]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Knoepfler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Knoepfler)

[3]: [http://www.ipscell.com/stap-new-data/](http://www.ipscell.com/stap-new-
data/)

[4]: [http://www.nature.com/news/arsenic-life-bacterium-prefers-
ph...](http://www.nature.com/news/arsenic-life-bacterium-prefers-phosphorus-
after-all-1.11520)

~~~
hga
Errr, there's a fantastic difference in the importance between this claim and
the arsenic-based bacterium one. A truly exotic bacterium would be neat, and
we might learn some interesting things from it.

A reversion of eukaryotic mature (mouse) cells into ones that can
differentiate would be astounding, and likely have many implications relevant
to us humans. And therefore a lot of groups self-evidently quickly tried to
reproduce it, leading to this quick result.

One general rule about fraudulent and/or mistaken research is that the more
important it is, the more likely and quicker it is that other labs will try to
build upon it, and discover it's bogus.

------
sizzle
also worth mentioning: [http://www.nature.com/news/mismatch-alleged-in-acid-
bath-ste...](http://www.nature.com/news/mismatch-alleged-in-acid-bath-stem-
cell-experiment-1.14946)

