Category: Falsification

STAP treatment papers

Haruko Obokata was a researcher and laboratory head at the Japanese Riken Center for Developmental Biology. In 2014, she published 2 Nature papers (here and here) in which she described an acid treatment to turn somatic cells (mouse blood cells) into pluripotent stem cells, a method that she named “stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency” or STAP.

Hours after publication, serious doubts about the validity of the paper were raised on Paul Knoepfler’s blog and PubPeer. Soon, people noticed similarities between photos in the Nature papers and those found in Obokata’s PhD thesis, in which these photos represented different experiments than those described in the Nature papers. In addition, no one was able to reproduce the STAP treatment, which just sounded too simple to be true.