When I asked the readers of this blog what they felt was the biggest stem cell story of 2014 in a poll, they overwhelmingly picked the STAP cell scandal.
For background on STAP you can toggle through the many STAP cell pieces on this blog here, see a STAP timeline, and a STAP image gallery.
Basically, STAP was a bogus scientific claim about a supposedly simple reprogramming method to make powerful stem cells induced by cellular stress.
Despite many flaws in this STAP research and the fact that it seemed way too good to be true, STAP was published in two Nature papers that came out toward the end of January 2014 that are now retracted.
The STAP mess was the product of many things going wrong, almost a perfect storm of research missteps and some have said even misconduct as well as arguably puzzling editorial decision making at one of the most prestigious journals in the world, Nature. Discussion of STAP pointed to more specific, serious problems. Image and data reuse. Plagiarism. Hype. Rush to publish. Unhealthy competition. Gift authorship. And more.
At some point we need to move on from STAP and thankfully that is happening, but there is still more to discuss before we can really fully move on and focus more squarely on the positive stuff. For example, a few puzzles remain about STAP such as where the supposed STAP cells really came from and also how Nature ended up publishing the STAP work when the scientific reviewers that Nature itself enlisted to review the submitted manuscripts skewered them.
The younger generations of scientists in the stem cell field are also watching how the field handles STAP and other events that invoke similar problems too. What lessons will they and the public take home from all of this? There are so many very real, wonderfully positive developments ongoing in the stem cell and regenerative medicine fields that I would rather be discussing instead of STAP, but we have to be careful. The risk that STAP-like events pose to our field comes in the form of a possible harmful narrative of the stem cell field fundamentally losing the public trust.
Great summary of the issues! And I have to put in my two cents’ worth… I know that talking about STAP is not fun, but I think that we need to NEVER forget the lessons learned– and we also need to keep pressing for answers to questions that are still unclear. My top one, frankly, wouldn’t be so much about STAP itself, but rather about what Riken has really done in order to address the issues that allowed STAP to arise. Have they done what they need to do? Does anyone know? Can this question be answered with a yes, no, or maybe? We need to keep a dialogue going. We have to remember that those who don’t understand the past just may put themselves at great risk of repeating it.