Another Stem Cell Debacle

Once again, a major advance in stem cell science has been tainted by allegations of fraud. A leading research centre in Japan, the RIKEN Institute, has apologised for “research misconduct” by a young scientist who published a paper in Nature in January which described an exciting new method for producing pluripotent stem cells.

The ease of the method astonished stem cell biologists, but no one was able to replicate the results and careful scrutiny of the paper soon revealed some troubling problems. It revived painful memories of the notorious Hwang Woo-suk and the fraudulent stem cell papers he published in 2005 in the journal Science.

Haruko Obokata now stands accused of misusing images to support the creation of what she and her colleagues termed “stimulus-triggered activation of pluripotency” (STAP) cells. She admits that there were mistakes in her paper, but denies the charges of misconduct. She also insists that the method does work.

A six-member committee set up by the RIKEN Institute was asked to investigate six errors in the paper. Four were found to be innocent mistakes, but two were branded “misconduct”. “Dr Obokata’s actions and sloppy data management lead us to the conclusion that she sorely lacks, not only a sense of research ethics, but also integrity and humility as a scientific researcher,” was their brutal conclusion. Nature is conducting its own investigation.

The president of RIKEN, Nobel laureate Ryoji Noyori, issued an apology both for Obokata’s alleged misconduct and for the carelessness of her co-authors. If the misconduct is confirmed after the appeals process, he said that the paper should be retracted and that the authors would be disciplined.

Harvard researcher Dr Charles A. Vacanti was also a co-author. He maintains that his version of the STAP process works. “While the investigation determined there were errors and poor judgment in the development of the manuscript, I do not believe that these errors affect the scientific content or the conclusions,” he told the Boston Globe.

The method could still be vindicated or at least it could give insights into pluripotency. A Hong Kong researcher even said earlier this week that Vacanti’s protocol seemed to work. RIKEN is going to conduct a “rigorous scientific re-evaluation” of STAP which will take about a year to complete. But, as MIT expert Rudolf Jaenisch told the Globe, “It’s embarrassing; it’s not good for the field.”

Source: BioEdge

USA's Role in Japanese Vivisection Atrocities

US scientists were “accomplices after the fact” in Japanese doctors’ war crimes
by Michael Cook

All of contemporary bioethics springs from the Nuremberg Doctors Trial in 1947. Seven Nazi doctors and officials were hanged and nine received severe prison sentences for performing experiments on an estimated 25,000 prisoners in concentration camps without their consent. Only about 1,200 died but many were maimed and psychologically scarred.

So did the US do to the hundreds of Japanese medical personnel who experimented on Chinese civilians and prisoners of war of many nationalities, including Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Australians, and Americans? They killed an estimated 3,000 people in the infamous Unit 731 in Harbin, in northeastern China before and during World War II – plus tens of thousands of civilians when they field-tested germ warfare. Many of the doctors were academics from Japan's leading medical schools.

Nothing.

Well, almost nothing. Twelve doctors were tried and found guilty by the Soviets in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949, but they were all repatriated in 1956. American authorities dismissed the trials as Soviet propaganda. Many of the doctors in Unit 731 went on to successful careers in Japan after the War. The commander of the unit, Shirō Ishii, lived in relative obscurity but his successor late in the war, Kitano Masaji, became head of one of Japan’s leading pharmaceutical companies.

How did the Japanese doctors escape justice?

A fascinating answer appears in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. The broad outline of the story has been well documented, even if it is not widely known. To cut a long story short, the Americans struck a deal with the doctors. They traded immunity from prosecution for access to scientific information from the ghastly Japanese experiments – many of which are too grim to detail here. (If you have the stomach for it, a remorseful doctor describes, at the age of 90, some of his vivisection experiments in an article in the Japan Times.)

Read it all here.

US Lawmakers React on N. Korea Negotiations

Michael Bowman April 14, 2013

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's suggestion of negotiations with North Korea has provoked a mixed reaction from U.S. lawmakers.

Speaking in Tokyo Sunday, Secretary Kerry reiterated America's longstanding commitment to Japan's defense. At a news conference with his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishada, Kerry urged dialogue with Pyongyang.

"Hopefully, North Korea will hear our words, and recognize that for the future of its people and for the future stability in the region, as well as on the [Korean] peninsula itself, there is a clear course of action that they are invited to take. And they will find in us ready partners to negotiate in good faith to resolve this issue."

In Washington, Democratic Senator Richard Durbin applauded the Obama administration's offer of negotiations.

"I think Secretary Kerry has it right. We are willing to step forward, but we want to see some positive measures from the North Koreans that bring down this harsh and hot rhetoric."

Speaking on the Fox News Sunday television program, Durbin said efforts to defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula would be strengthened by more robust efforts from China, North Korea's main economic partner.

"It is time for you [China] to step up and show some leadership in this region of the world. We are prepared to work toward a common goal of peace. But we need the Chinese to tell the North Koreans that if they want to continue this escalation of rhetoric, it is at the expense of the safety of this world as well as their own economy."
Some U.S. lawmakers are wary of possible negotiations with North Korea. Also appearing on Fox News Sunday, Republican Senator John Cornyn said the United States must not reward Pyongyang's belligerence.

"I am not for paying an unhinged leader like Kim Jong-un ransom in order for him to tone down his rhetoric. It is like a bad movie. We keep seeing the re-runs."

Monday, Kerry meets with Japan's prime minister. Japan is within range of North Korean missiles.


From here.

Ethical Science is Good Science

A Nobel Prize for Ethics

By Michael Cook

Two stem cell researchers have shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2012, an elderly Briton, Sir John B. Gurdon, and a younger Japanese, Shinya Yamanaka. By a serendipitous coincidence, Sir John made his discovery in 1962 -- the year of Yamanaka's birth.

Fifty years of stem cell research have brought cures for intractable diseases within reach but they have also generated firestorms of controversy. Between 2001 and 2008, stem cell research vied with climate change as the most contentious issue in science. But since then, the firestorm died down -- basically because of Yamanaka’s achievements. In fact, Tom Douglas, of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, at Oxford University, describes Yamanaka's work as “a rare example of a scientific discovery that may solve more ethical problems than it creates".

So what happened in these 50 years? (Click here for a graphic explanation from the Nobel Committee.)

In his classic experiment at the University of Cambridge, Sir John discovered that cell development is reversible. The conventional wisdom was that cells could never change once they had specialized as nerve, skin, or muscle cells. He proved that this was wrong by replacing the nucleus of a frog egg cell with a nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. This modified cell developed into a normal tadpole.

This astonishing development eventually led to the cloning of the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, in 1996 and subsequent attempts by rogue scientists to clone human beings.

But while the technique clearly worked, no one really understood how cell development worked. The obvious target for research was the embryo. From this ball of undifferentiated cells come each of the body's specialized cells -- more than 200 of them in humans. Surely the answer must lie there. In 1998 an American scientist, James Thomson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, isolated and cultivated human embryonic stem cells.

But a one-eyed focus on embryos left stem cell science hostage to ethics. Despite scientists’ bravado, everyone had some qualms about destroying embryos for their stem cells. Even Thomson admitted to the New York Times that "if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough”.

Still, it seemed the only way forward. Desperate patient advocates, backed by a supporting chorus of bioethicists, scientists and doctors, argued tearfully that the possibility of miracle cures had to trump ethics.

But, in 2006, there came astonishing news from the University of Kyoto. An orthopaedic surgeon turned stem cell scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, had discovered that skin cells from mature mice could be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells. It was an amazingly imaginative step. Instead of mimicking natural development from embryo to adult, why not wind back the clock from adult to embryo?

Yamanaka found that by introducing only a few genes, specialized skin cells could become pluripotent stem cells, i.e. immature cells that can develop into all types of cells in the body. Until then, creating pluripotent cells without resorting to cloning seemed unlikely. Like Gurdon, for whom he has an immense respect, Yamanaka had skittled the conventional wisdom.

This was electrifying news for biologists. It was as if commuters on the pot-holed, terrorist-infested road from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone could suddenly detour down a six-lane autobahn at 200km. Many famous scientists dropped human embryonic stem cells and began work on what Yamanaka had termed "induced pluripotent stem cells". A year later, in November 2007, both he and James Thomson, in separate papers, confirmed that human cells could also be reprogrammed.

The rest is history.

As the Nobel Committee says about Gurdon and Yamanaka's research, "Textbooks have been rewritten and new research fields have been established. By reprogramming human cells, scientists have created new opportunities to study diseases and develop methods for diagnosis and therapy."

What turned Yamanaka away from the group-think which goaded his colleagues into the swamp of human embryonic stem cell research? Nowadays, the feverish excitement over human embryonic stem cells in the early Noughties seems ridiculous. Leading scientific and medical journals launched a crusade of Enlightenment heroes against prejudiced troglodytes. In one memorable endorsement of embryo research, the New England Journal of Medicine -- the world's leading medical journal -- published an editorial which concluded with this cringeworthy hyperbole: "The Promethean prospect of eternal regeneration awaits us, while time's vulture looks on." It never mentioned cell reprogramming.

Yamanaka's originality may have sprung from his ethical sensitivities. Even Julian Savulescu, the director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, who has no objections to embryo research, recognises this. "Yamanaka has taken people’s ethical concerns seriously about embryo research and modified the trajectory of research into a path that is acceptable for all. He deserves not only a Nobel Prize for Medicine, but a Nobel Prize for Ethics."

In an interview with the New York Times in 2007, Yamanaka remembered one day years before when he paid a social visit to a friend's IVF clinic. There, he peered through a microscope. "When I saw the embryo, I suddenly realised there was such a small difference between it and my daughters," said the father of two. "I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way."

Nor does he believe that scientists should put progress above ethics. In another 2007 interview, with New Scientist, he spoke about the firestorms. "These are very difficult decisions, and I think that society should make them," he said. "It should not be scientists. They can find it difficult to think like the person on the street, and instead may see it simply as a good opportunity. We scientists can be involved in the decision-making process, but I think unless society is comfortable with the therapy it should not go ahead."

Once again, experience shows that that ethical science is good science.

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

UN's Flawed Fertility Figures

NEW YORK, August 25 (C-FAM) The UN has reversed a decade of speculation about a demographic winter in the West, and now says that every country will achieve replacement fertility by 2100 resulting in a global population of 10 billion. The problem is there is no basis for their turnabout.

UN agencies are hailing new numbers as evidence of overpopulation in the developing world and vindication of decades of anti-natal policies in the West, but the scientific basis of the latest UN forecasts is slim.

The most significant change in the UN’s new numbers is an increase in the predicted convergence rate from 1.85 children per woman, below replacement, to 2.1, about replacement fertility.

While the UN claims there is consensus on the matter, demographers have long argued that there is no evidence to support the assumption that global fertility will ever converge, and no basis for the assertion that all nations go through three phases of demographic change: from declining birth rates where most developing nations are today, to below replacement rates experienced by all developed countries except the US, and finally to recovery at near replacement rates which a few Northern European countries have achieved.

Adherents to the recovery hypothesis say that the dip in European fertility rates may be due to women’s delaying childbearing. But as a new RAND study points out, “changes in birth timing can affect short-term birthrates” but “the effects are mild, and the result of delay can be permanent for the population as a whole even if not permanent for any one woman.”

In terms of youth 15-24 years old entering the workforce or military, the new figures would mean that India’s much-anticipated demographic advantage over China would be curtailed. India would have 75 million fewer youth by 2050, and 324 million fewer by 2100, while China would gain 26 million more than previously expected.

Germany’s share of youth in 2050 would rise from a projected 8.5 percent to 10 percent of its population according to the new UN forecast, more than doubling the number of youth previously predicted by 2100. Likewise, the number of Russian youth would be more than twice existing projections, and Japan’s share of youth would jump from just 7.7 percent in 2050 to 10.4 percent in 2100.

In sharp contrast, governments remain pessimistic. Recent reports from the European Commission and the Japanese government, for example, assume that fertility will remain near today’s levels which are about 1.3 in Japan, and 1.4 in Germany.

To achieve the dramatically new fertility predictions, the UN Population Division created a “probabilistic model” that uses high capacity computing to run 100,000 of fertility scenarios for each country.

While this new model gives a patina of greater scientific accuracy, it is based upon an arbitrary and unsubstantiated fertility rate. Just because demographers now have the capability of churning out many thousands of scenarios for each country studied does not mean the result is scientific.

Policy analysts would do well to reject the UN one-size-fits-all fertility projections and rely instead on data accounting for the various national factors contributing to desired family size.

 From here.

Related reading:  UN Population Data and Global Power