Stem-cell biologist Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, saw his career go off the rails last month when two papers he co-authored with visiting researcher Haruko Obokata were retracted by the journal Nature. The retractions were issued after it came to light that Obokata had manipulated data and plagiarized some of the research. On Tuesday, Sasai hanged himself:
Yoshiki Sasai, 52, was found in a research institution next to his workplace by a security guard on Tuesday morning and was pronounced dead at a hospital two hours later.
Sasai might not have been responsible for Obokata’s misdeeds, but the scandal ruined him nonetheless. To Michael Eisen, Sasai’s tragic end illustrates some big problems with how the scientific community handles misconduct:
Obviously, fraud is a terrible thing. Nothing provides as deep an existential threat to the scientific enterprise than making up data. But as bad as it is, there is something deeply ugly about the way the scientific community responds to misconduct. We need to deal swiftly with fraud when it is identified. But time after time I have watched not only the accused, but everyone around them, be treated with such sanctimonious disdain.
Imagine what it must be like to have devoted your life to science, and then to discover that someone in your midst – someone you have some role in supervising – has committed the ultimate scientific sin. That itself must be disturbing enough. Indeed I remember how upset my father was as he was trying to prove that fraud had taken place. But then imagine what it must feel like to all of a sudden become the focal point for scrutiny – to experience your colleagues and your field casting you aside. It must feel like your whole world is collapsing around you, and not everybody has the mental strength to deal with that.
Jane Hu blames this on a warped academic culture that pushes scientists to publish too quickly and, in some ways, incentivizes fraud:
Overall, academic fraud is rare, which makes it all the more shocking when a major case is uncovered. To the public, it may seem mind-boggling that scientists would go to such lengths to deceive. In an ideal world, scientists work together to make incremental discoveries that add to the body of knowledge in a field and are recognized for quality work. In reality, the world of science can be cutthroat and isolating, with little oversight. Stem cell research is certainly not the only research field with a fraud problem, but it has all the right elements to motivate dishonesty: It’s a cutting-edge field with the potential to discover treatments for human diseases; it attracts highly competitive people who are all scrambling to make the next big discovery; and that discovery must be made, written, and published before any competitors can catch up. Add to that an academic culture that places ever-rising pressure on researchers to churn out publications in order to land jobs or tenure—especially publications in high-impact journals like Nature and Science—and you begin to see why researchers resort to cutting corners or massaging their data.
The Dish 