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New leaked e-mails showing the comments of referees for Science and Nature provide more insight into the saga of the STAP papers, which Nature published in January and retracted in July.
The papers had promised new, simpler ways to produce stem cells by applying stress to cells taken from a patient’s tissues. But no other lab was able to reproduce the results, and experts pointed to several problems and inconsistencies in the papers. In April, first author Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, was declared guilty of scientific misconduct; the controversy later took a tragic turn as another co-author, Yoshiki Sasai, committed suicide on 5 August.
An investigative report into the papers, released in May, revealed that a previous version of the work had been rejected by Nature, Cell and Science in 2012, before being resubmitted and accepted by Nature. (Nature’s news and comment team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.)
That report gave details from the Science referees who pointed out that one figure had been “reconstructed” in...