To Err is Human….

People make mistakes. Some are premeditated and some are honest mistakes. The punishment should be according to the impact of the act on the victim. Scientific misconduct is a serious offense. The impact varies depending on the claims made. Some reports direct the whole field to wrong direction, wasting so much time and money. Others have no impact in any field because no one would notice them. Whatever the case may be, science is a self-correcting institution. Bad science will not prevail. As Dr. Baltimore once said misconduct does not cause any major damage to science in long term because if the misconduct is done to make any major claim, it will easily be revealed since many people will try to reproduce it. If it is insignificant then who care what the claim is!  It is true when you look at the larger scheme of things. But even if it is manipulation of smaller scale the perpetrator may gain things such as grant money or promotion over some honest folks.

The tragic news I heard today elicited these thoughts in me. Few months back there was a startling study that came out in Nature about some novel ways to generate stem cells from adult somatic cells. Few years back Dr. Yamanaka won Noble prize for the discovery of induce pluripotent stem cells where he showed that over expression of some master transcription factors is sufficient to drive cells to more primitive cellular state. It kick started a whole new field of research with a wide range of possibility from personalized medicine to recreating long dead animal species. One drawback of this technology is the necessity to over express some transcription factors, which by themselves can make the cells to proliferate crazy and form tumors. This limited the in vivo application of this technology. But everyone knows that it is just a matter of time to perfect this technology. The surprising study that I was referring to previously, showed that you don’t need any over expression of transcription factors to make stem cells from adult cells, but just expose them to various stress conditions such as acid baths of physical turbulence. If true, it would be a much simpler system and perfectly safe at the first look. But to many people, it sounded too simple to be true. Later on many questions were raised about this study from inability to independently reproduce the data and some other problems with images in the figure. The paper again came to limelight but for all wrong reasons. It was retracted last month.

Today I read the news that the lead author of the paper Dr. Yoshiki Sasai committed suicide.  I found it shocking and very unfortunate. Lots of people commit suicide for various reasons. But when someone from your own profession does that for professional reasons you will see it differently. Is your life worth all these? Well, I can only imagine the humiliation he might have gone through after the retraction and subsequent enquiries. But people go through much worse things. But anyways, it is a reminder to all of us, both scientists and non-scientist. Make big claims only with compelling and validated evidences. When you get a surprising data, don’t run down the hall and make big announcements, but that is the time to be silent and meditate.  That is the time to wear the hat of your own worst critic to disprove the hypothesis in all possible ways. When all the attempts to disprove your hypothesis fail you can afford to have a smile. I am truly saddened that such a tragedy happened to a dedicated scientist. I know it is not easy to accomplish what Dr. Sasai has accomplished in his lifetime. I know how much hard work has gone into it. May it do happen to any one else.