記事内容だ。
A revolutionary way of making stem cells claimed last year by Japanese and US researchers never existed in the first place. That is the conclusion of two papers published on 23 September in Nature — the same journal that published the original, ill-fated papers early last year.
In January 2014, a team led by researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, published two papers claiming that embryonic-like stem cells — which are pluripotent, or able to form any of the body’s more than 200 cell types — could be produced by exposing adult body cells to stress, such as acidic conditions or physical pressure. The authors named the technique stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP.
However, other scientists quickly found problems with data in the research — and, following an investigation, the papers were retracted.
But whether the procedure might have worked, and where the pluripotent stem cells labelled STAP in the RIKEN laboratory came from, were still unresolved matters.
