Japan lab weighing retraction of stem cell paper

[Coligny]

Stem cells: Japan’s scientific ‘moonshot’
A push to exploit the country’s lead in the sector risks being
tripped up by regulation, sparking fears it could lose out to a rival
]

If god created the earth... Darwin created Japan:..
Jury still open for the circumstances leading to the birth of the first Juggaloo...

And for the French you might ask ?

Easy...

We created god... during lunch break...

[Russell]

And for the French you might ask ?

Easy...

We created god... during lunch break...

Thanks for pointing out the problem...

[Coligny]

Yes, your mom was a failed experiment, we should have canned the whole research facility...

[Takechanpoo]

The void is the first large inner structure discovered within the 4,500-year-old pyramid since the 1800s—a find made possible by recent advances in high-energy particle physics. The results were published in the journal Nature.

“This is definitely the discovery of the century,” says archaeologist and Egyptologist Yukinori Kawae, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. “There have been many hypotheses about the pyramid, but no one even imagined that such a big void is located above the Grand Gallery.”



In the Great Pyramid’s case, a team led by Nagoya University physicist Kunihiro Morishima placed muon detectors inside the pyramid starting in December 2015, letting them collect data for months.

Morishima’s first results came in March 2016—and to researchers’ surprise, they suggested that a region deep in the pyramid’s interior let many more muons through than they had been expecting. These “excess” muons seemed to trace a 100-foot-long cavity with a cross-section resembling the Grand Gallery.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/201 ... y-science/

[matsuki]

[Mike Oxlong]

Came across a rather interesting statistic...

...Sato's fraudulent work has propelled him to No. 6 on Retraction Watch's list of researchers who have racked up the most retractions. At the top is Japanese anesthesiologist Yoshitaka Fujii, with 183 retractions; his frequent co-author Yuhji Saitoh, also from Japan, is at 10th place, while Japanese endocrinologist Shigeaki Kato is No. 8. Iwamoto is at No. 9. That means half of the top 10 are Japanese researchers. Yet only about 5% of published research comes from Japan. What explains the number of prolific Japanese fraudsters?

Michiie Sakamoto, who is leading another investigation at Keio University, into Iwamoto's studies in animals, says it has to do with respect. "In Japan, we don't usually doubt a professor," he says. "We basically believe people. We think we don't need strict rules to watch them carefully." As a result, researchers faking their results may be exposed only after they have racked up many publications.

Outside researchers may also be less likely to question anomalous results from Japan. Several early critics of Sato's work say they thought at first that his unusual results might be due to something uniquely Japanese. One case in point: In 2003, Sato published a study on data from 40 patients with a very rare affliction named neuroleptic malignant syndrome, collected over 3 years. In a letter to the journal, a U.K. neurologist said he and his colleagues "could only recall two such cases in living memory"—but instead of casting doubt on the study, they said it was interesting that the syndrome seemed so prevalent in Japan....

Tide of Lies: Researcher at the center of an epic fraud remains an enigma to those who exposed him

[Wage Slave]

Tacky triggered.

[Takechanpoo]

this field has almost no potential for growth. its highly likely that another some myopic guys have done the same thing.
the one saving grace is that the j-sides themselves already punished those fabricators.

[Russell]

This is fucking shocking. I didn't know about these cases.

I really like that this article is published in Science. Some people in Japan really will not like that, but it is kind of deserved because they let the guy get away with it.

It is cases like these that make it very difficult for honest researchers in Japan. Nowadays if you want to apply for external funding you have to take an "e-learning" course with questions afterwards. This is quite time-consuming, though some of these courses are actually pretty good. I recently did the one for the Japan Science and Technology Agency, and was surprised how well if was done, especially the text.

[Russell]

I was just thinking, most of these scandals in Japan appear to involve researchers in the medical field. Could it be a coincidence that it was in the medical field that female applicants were discriminated against in their entrance examinations.

[matsuki]

I was just thinking, most of these scandals in Japan appear to involve researchers in the medical field. Could it be a coincidence that it was in the medical field that female applicants were discriminated against in their entrance examinations.

Is it really limited to the medical field though? I think they pretty much nailed it with the whole nihonjinron unquestionable superiors military mentality.

In Japan, we don’t usually doubt a professor. We basically believe people. We think we don’t need strict rules to watch them carefully.

We we we wee Japanese

As noted, it sucks for legit researchers here in soo many ways.

This doesn't help:

"We speculate that most natural science researchers in Japan may be either confused about or struggle with the situation where the strict global criteria conflict with specific local cultures that often condone gift and ghost authorships," the researchers wrote.

Japaneeeeezu sutairu!

[TennoChinko]

The RETRACTION WATCH leasderboard that was cited in the article:

https://retractionwatch.com/the-retract ... aderboard/

The Retraction Watch Leaderboard
Who has the most retractions? Here’s our unofficial list (see notes on methodology), which we’ll update as more information comes to light:

● Yoshitaka Fujii (total retractions: 183) See also: Final report of investigating committee, our reporting, additional coverage
● Joachim Boldt (96) See also: Editors-in-chief statement, our coverage
● Diederik Stapel (58) See also: our coverage
● Adrian Maxim (48) See also: our coverage
● Chen-Yuan (Peter) Chen (43) See also: SAGE, our coverage
● Yoshihiro Sato (42) See also: our coverage
● Hua Zhong (41) See also: journal notice
● Shigeaki Kato (39) See also: our coverage
● Jun Iwamoto (38) See also: our coverage
● Yuhji Saitoh (38)  See also: our coverage
● James Hunton (37) See also: our coverage
● Hyung-In Moon (35) See also: our coverage
● Naoki Mori (32) See also: our coverage
● Jan Hendrik Schön (32) See also: our coverage
● Soon-Gi Shin (30) See also: our coverage
● Tao Liu (29) See also: our coverage
● Cheng-Wu Chen (28) See also: our coverage
● A Salar Elahi (27) See also: our coverage
● Richard L E Barnett (26) See also: our coverage
● Scott Reuben (24) See also: our coverage
● Gilson Khang (22) See also: our coverage
● Noel Chia (21) See also: our coverage
● Friedhelm Herrmann (21) See also: our coverage
● Stanley Rapoport (21) See also: our coverage
● Fazlul Sarkar (21) See also: our coverage
● Dipak Das (20) See also: our coverage
● Khalid Zaman (20) See also: our coverage
● Bharat Aggarwal (19) See also: our coverage
● Jin Cheng (19) See also: our coverage
● Andrzej Jendryczko (19) See also: our coverage


We note that all of the top 30 are men, which agrees with the general findings of a 2013 paper suggesting that men are more likely to have papers retracted for fraud.

Notes:

Many accounts of the John Darsee story cite 80-plus retractions, which would place him third on the list, but Web of Science only lists 17, three of which are categorized as corrections. That’s not the only discrepancy. For example, Fujii has 138 retractions listed in Web of Science, compared to 183 as recommended by a university committee, while Reuben has 25, compared to the 22 named in this paper. We know that not everything ends up in Web of Science — Chen, for example, isn’t there at all — so we’ve used our judgment based on covering these cases to arrive at the highest numbers we could verify.

Shigeaki Kato is likely to end up with 43 retractions, based on the results of a university investigation.

All of this is a good reminder why the database we’re building with the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation and Arnold Foundation will be useful.