*to Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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Sunday 13 April 2014

Obokata: "perverted golf-club" is hammer to her nail

'Japanese culture': afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.
Japan... is so broken (because of) what I call the “perverted golf-club mentality” — the big corporate networks made up of the banks and insurance companies and the big corporations.
Two months ago, 'Shisaku' had a pair of interesting stories on a Japanese woman scientist whose team published findings in Nature on a simpler, cheaper, way to get stem cells.  It's interesting enough that she is only thirty, conventionally attractive, yet taken at all seriously in this vastly sexist archipelago.


Well that didn't last very long...
The investigative panel, headed by Riken’s Shunsuke Ishii, found fabricated and falsified data in one of the two STAP papers published in Nature, of which Obokata was the lead author. The committee has refused to confirm or refute the existence of STAP cells.
Seems awfully harsh considering all they found was:
The panel labeled as a “fabrication” an image used in one of the papers that “closely resembled” one in her doctoral thesis for Waseda University, though the Riken-sponsored experiments were conducted under different conditions.  The panel also found that her manipulation of an image from a lab test to add contrast was an act of “falsification.”
I am no genetic researcher, but seems to me that's 'slap on the wrist' stuff.  Well, 'that's what she said':
I sincerely apologize for suspicions raised over my research papers and the enormous trouble caused to Riken, co-authors of the papers and many others due to my carelessness, sloppiness and immaturity... I think my mistakes were incredibly (immature) in the eyes of many researchers...  But these mistakes do not affect the conclusions of my paper, and above all, the experiments have been solidly conducted and the data (proving STAP cells) exist.
It's entirely possible her findings are bunkum, but it doesn't make me less suspicious of the unseemly appetite to take her down.  If you're not in Japan, you won't have seen the dismissal of her findings on most networks' news programs, and editorializing by Japan's fuck-wit tarento.  It's almost as if it were orchestrated.  They've even pushed her to a nervous breakdown.

So why the pile on?  'Follow the money'  Cui bono?  Over a billion US dollars of government funding to Shinya Yamanaka and the Kyoto University Center for iPS Cell Research are the issue (whose work becomes obsolete) not the science.  That's enough to buy some media, no?  Especially if you're a connected male, middle aged or better, and have the ear of the PM who's the same, as are the rest of the "perverted golf club".*  "And so it goes..."


I'll wait to make my conclusions on her science once there is news on this from abroad, based on the repeatability of her findings (you know, science), not from a Japanese agency using Japanese 'data'.  The larger point is the lesson for women, though perhaps not quite the one "the perverted golf-club" meant as the take-away: if you're intellectually honest and innovative, leave Japan; if you're something more than a fuck-muppet, the same.  I wouldn't suggest the US or Canada, mind you.

*Read your Wolferen if you want to understand this country at all.  It should be decades out of date, except Japan doesn't do incremental change.

9 comments:

  1. The Japanese media are very capable of being needlessly bloodthirsty and vicious and this happens to be one of the more recent cases. They're quick to celebrate Japanese international superiority and are even better at breaking people down in a seemingly concerted effort.

    My stance in this whole affair is that while her paper seemed to be peppered with paragraphs lifted from other papers, which deserves scrutiny, but the witch hunt that came from a matter that really didn't concern the public beyond her scientific peers is revolting. I say give her a chance to do her findings right. If she can't reproduce her originally published findings then she's succeeded as a scientist following the scientific method. Which in that case, just as any proper scientist would, go back and figure out where things went wrong.

    There's way too much pressure on people to succeed in the name of the motherland here. I hope she comes out stronger from this and doesn't give up just because the useless talking heads found her as flavor of the week.

    Thanks for writing on this topic. I've felt queasy about how quick the media here descended on her like a flock of ravenous vultures.



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    1. "I've felt queasy about how quick the media here descended on her like a flock of ravenous vultures."

      Yup. 'Trust your gut', I say. Even if she's a fraud it's a red-herring. There's no shortage of frauds in Japan getting a pass. Why pick on her?

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  2. "“I sincerely apologize for suspicions raised over my research papers and the enormous trouble caused to Riken, co-authors of the papers and many others due to my carelessness, sloppiness and immaturity,” she said. “I think my mistakes were incredibly (immature) in the eyes of many researchers."

    This, followed by nothing to confirm that her findings were legitimate is pretty damning in the scientific community. You'd think a high-level scientist would have been more professional. She deserves the slapdown she's getting in the media. There's no room for this kind of fuckery in science. Remember these characters: Hwang Woo-suk and Hisashi Moriguchi?

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    1. Maybe, but my point is the coverage, and the speed and orchestration of it. I added this to try to be clear on that: "**It's entirely possible her findings are bunkum, but it doesn't make me less suspicious of the unseemly appetite to take her down."

      Lots of people commit intellectual fraud, or poor science, and are disciplined within their own field, if caught at all. This situation doesn't pass the smell test.

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    2. I get that; it's just that as someone educated as a scientist, I have a zero-tolerance policy for this kind of behavior.

      Yes, the good-old-boy club doesn't even try to hide its selective discrimination; The case of Takafumi Horie is a classic example.

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    3. Looked him up. Yes, that's a curious tale. They managed to kill 20% of the value of his company, and much more of Horie's own, but who got to make the decision to close the exchange down lest the damage spread to the whole house of cards (Japanese economy/ domestic debt)...?

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  3. Japan; fake menus, fake deaf composer- all fixed with a もし言い訳ありません. But Obokata is being tortured into mental ill health by the media. Fraud or not, it's double-standards.

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  4. For a non-Japanese, savvy and knowledgeable take on the science of the STAP cell debacle, there is the Knoepfler Stem Cell Lab blog. A typical recent post:

    http://www.ipscell.com/2014/03/clues-as-to-the-real-stap-cell-scoop-a-trio-of-biosci-traps/

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    1. I did hedge my bets on the science, while insisting on the smell-factor. Billy's example of Takafumi Horie is another. Both Horie and Obokata may be entirely guilty of fraud in their fields, and yet, considering how disproportionately punished they have been within their respective fields one's naive not to suspect a character-assassination hasn't been orchestrated by 'erai-hito' no less compromised.

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