STAP in the Name of Love — The Dangers of Scientific Overreach

STAP in the Name of Love — The Dangers of Scientific Overreach

By Gwen Schanker, Journalism and Biology, 2017

Science is constantly evolving. Every day, new phenomena, techniques and ideas are discovered and explored. Scientists live and work in a continually shifting environment, where with the right amount of resources, research and testing, they can investigate any and all possibilities in their field.

One of the most exciting parts of a researcher’s job is revealing new discoveries to the scientific community. While adding to the breadth of scientific knowledge is almost always a positive development, researchers also carry an enormous responsibility: they must be careful not to make assumptions or gloss over unknowns. Scientists are aware of the consequences of research misconduct, but the excitement generated by a new idea can still lead to an oversight that can have a dramatic effect on the scientific community as well as on the researchers themselves.

In January 2014, the release of two papers in Nature describing a new method of producing stem cells set the scientific world abuzz. The method, which was explored by a smattering of Japan- and Boston-based researchers and which is referred to as stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP, involved an amazingly simple process of exposing adult cells to an acidic environment that caused them to convert to embryonic stem cells. The first discovery that mature cells could be converted to pluripotent stem cells, known as the induced pluripotent stem cell or iPS method, was discovered by a team of researchers in Japan headed by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006. STAP was showcased as a new and simpler method to achieve the same aim as iPS, and when the papers first came out the research was hailed as “one of the most startling scientific discoveries in years” (Boston Globe).

However, when other teams were unable to recreate the results described in the research papers, scientists began to scrutinize the papers more closely. Eventually, a number of researchers were convicted of scientific misconduct for manipulating the images, driven by the fact that scientists were unable to reproduce the results. As of early June, all of the Japanese authors, including Haruko Okobata and Yoshika Sasai, have agreed to a retraction of the papers. Tokyo’s RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB), where much of the research on the STAP method took place, may even be shut down as a result of the incident.

The conduct committee overseeing the case of the RIKEN Center said “a drive to produce groundbreaking results led to publishing results prematurely” (news.sciencemag.org). The STAP cell discovery made headlines in Boston, Japan and beyond, and scientists like Okobata of Japan and Charles Vacanti at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s were praised for their groundbreaking research. The researchers stood by their work even after accusations of misconduct, because they believed they were right. The fact that the papers were discredited doesn’t necessarily mean the scientists were wrong, or that the STAP cell method can never be recreated, but it does demonstrate a worrisome problem of overreach in the scientific community.

This isn’t the first time overly ambitious results have been an issue — it’s not even the first time in the last year. In April, a group of researchers from McGill University in Montreal found that pain relief studies in mice might have overlooked gender as an important factor in their results. The team discovered that when mice are treated with an irritant to measure their pain response, they’re less likely to demonstrate signs of pain when male researchers are around than when females are present. The research stated that mice experienced a spike in stress as a result of male odor, which masked the intensity of the pain. This could have enormous implications in terms of how future pain relief studies are conducted, and could render past studies irrelevant because they did not take gender into account.

In early 2013, the FDA cut the recommended dose of Ambien, a sleep medication, in half for women because of a discovery that men and women process the drug differently. 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl expanded on this discovery in February 2014, revealing information that drugs are often processed differently according to gender, but their effects are not normally noted separately in government-funded studies. This oversight could have enormous implications in terms of the recommended dosage of drugs for women versus men.

Whether researchers are prematurely publishing a new discovery or overlooking the difference that gender can make, overreach appears to be a significant issue in the scientific community. While scientists are trained to be unbiased, they are only human, and the desire to produce incredible results — as well as the certainty that they are right — can sometimes lead to premature celebration of those results. While the public is always excited to read about scientific discoveries that may lead to a breakthrough, readers should be careful that their own excitement does not affect the scientific process.

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