Science Fraud "Made in Japan"

An investigation at the prestigious University of Tokyo has revealed the possibility of scientific misconduct by some of its researchers.

he prestigious University of Tokyo has taken steps of virtually closing the laboratory of the 53-year old professor, Kazunari Taira for fabricating results in a series of “pioneering” RNA studies carried out in his laboratory which were aimed at leading to development of anticancer and other drugs and were carried out with a massive amount of public money. More specifically the state supported Taira’s research with more than 1.4 billion yen in taxpayers’ money over the past six years.

Kimitsuna Watanabe, chairman of the Japan RNA society who asked the university to investigate 12 papers by Taira and other researchers stated: “About two years ago, we started getting complaints from overseas that the experiment results could not be reproduced, so we had to look into it.”. The University selected a few of these papers and asked Taira to submit raw data by September. He failed to do so, blaming his assistant and co-author Kawasaki for not keeping good notebooks and storing back-up data on a computer that broke. The deadline for raw data submission was extended to the end of March, but again no evidence of reproducibility emerged.

One of the papers which is believed to be fabricated was published in Nucleic Acids Research in 2003 titled: “siRNAs generated by recombinant human Dicer induce specific and significant but target site-independent gene silencing in human cells”, in which Taira claimed that his research team had succeeded in having E.Coli bacteria produce a human enzyme called Dicer –so called as it dices RNA- by implanting the Dicer gene into a plasmid. Criticism by other researchers began some time ago taking the form of a joke since it seemed that “RNA could be cut off only at Taira’s laboratory…”.

Professor Taira says he requested the retractions because of “a problem of research ethics”

Taira himself has asked for retraction of five papers in question. So far Kawasaki has not agreed to sign off on the retractions. The papers are the following (please note the number of citations of each paper as determined by Google Scholar; this is indicative of the scientific setback caused by this fraud)

Article 1: Hes1 is a target of microRNA-23 during retinoic-acid-induced neuronal differentiation of NT2 cells. This paper has 29 Citations .

Article 2: siRNAs generated by recombinant human Dicer induce specific and significant but target site-independent gene silencing in human cells. This paper has 55 Citations.

Article 3: Induction of DNA methylation and gene silencing by short interfering RNAs in human cells. This paper has 103 Citations.

Article 4: Identification of genes that function in the TNF-alpha-mediated apoptotic pathway using randomized hybrid ribozyme libraries.. This paper has 49 Citations.

Article 5: Identification of genes by hybrid ribozymes that couple cleavage activity with the unwinding activity of an endogenous RNA helicase.. This paper has 45 Citations.

Having Korea and Stem Cell Research in mind, it seems that it is quite trendy nowadays to make up results. Let’s see how this will end…