
University of Tokyo researchers lied about gaining the approval of an ethics review board and conducted studies without donors' consent for several articles published in medical journals...Professor Arinobu Tojo, who heads a lab on molecular therapy for leukemia and other blood diseases at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Medical Science, acknowledged the wrongdoing and has retracted one of the published articles...The researchers extracted bone marrow and peripheral blood from acute myeloid leukemia patients... The researchers wrote that they had acquired both the approval of the institute's ethics review board and written consent from all donor patients, in line with the Declaration of Helsinki by the World Medical Association. But Tojo admitted that the research was not reviewed by the ethics panel and that only some of the patients had given their written consent. "Our awareness of ethics in conducting research was lenient. I wrote (the false descriptions), but I cannot recall clearly whether I was aware at that time that I was lying," Tojo said...more...