Women Causes Death of Chief Stem Cell Scientist

Stay away from women, Fred. They are dangerous. Better not even look at one.

Someone should have advised Yoshiki Sasai to that effect...

one.

It would be unwise to adopt a blanket policy of rejecting female collaborat ors today. People - some of them female - would complain.

Better to avoid over-ambitious and under-scrupulous collaborators of either sex. Sadly, that sort of potential collaborator complains very loudly abou t being rejected on grounds of prudence, and the complaints may include har d-to-verify or -disprove allegations of misconduct by the complainee.

Academic office politics can get nasty.

Well this is interesting. Japanese scientist gets caught mouse-painting and commits suicide!

That's odd. I thought stem cell research was as politicized as climate science! If he'd been faking data to prove "anthropogenic global warming" he not only wouldn't have been caught, but the biggest organizations up to and including the UN would cover for him and even better it would insure continued high level funding for continued mouse-painting.

Stem cells? Suicide? Really. If you are going to sell out, go where the big dogs run.

He probably thinks they have Cooties!

and commits suicide!

Strictly speaking, he wasn't "mouse-painting" - it was his collaborator wh o seems to have been doing the stuff that nobody could replicate

cience!

Neither is politicised. Both are interesting to the media, and anybody who has an interesting result in either area can expect to see it publicised.

Stem cell research is interesting because stem cells can develop into any o f the many different cells that make up our bodies.

Climate change is interesting because it's going on at the moment and the o bvious way of slowing it down - burning less fossil carbon as fuel - would make a number of rich and successful commercial organisations rather less p rofitable, if put into action.

These two situations aren't parallel, and generate very different pressures on researchers in the two areas.

nly wouldn't have been caught, but the biggest organizations up to and incl uding the UN would cover for him and even better it would insure continued high level funding for continued mouse-painting.

Why do you think that? There's no evidence that any body has faked any evid ence to prove that climate change - anthropogenic global warming - is going on. For other thing, there's no need to. You may have noticed that the den ialist propaganda machine has been trying to claim that Michael Mann's "hoc key stick" temperature reconstruction was wrong, pretty much since it was f irst published in 1998.

Despite the denialists enthusiastic (and generously funded) claims, the res ult has since been essentially replicated by a dozen other academics using different proxies for temperature derived from very different sorts of laye red deposits. This is the sort of result you'd expect for good science -

None of these results suit the denialist propaganda machine, so they ignore them.

Stem cell research has thrown up a few initially promising studies which ha ven't looked as promising when looked at more carefully. This is a rather d ifferent situation.

big dogs run.

There's absolutely no suggestion that the guy that killed himself had "sold out". His collaborator may have been over-optimistic in her interpretation of some early experimental results, and not been as conscientious as she m ight have been in searching for alternative explanations - "confounds" - fo r her results. She wasn't being bribed, but she might well have been excite d by the prospect of being noticed in the way she was. He may well have bee n embarrassed by the thought that he should have been more conscientious ab out tempering her enthusiasm. It's a tragedy, rather than conspiracy theory fodder.

I love my girls, and they are all beautiful. Well, maybe not the parrot.

Fred is seriously messed up about women, and afraid of them. I think you are, too.

too.

Losing sight of the fact that women are people and just as various as men is a failure of judgement. Intense experiences can leave people confused.

Playing Dr. Phil again? You have no clue.

OK, correction: you are seriously messed up about men, too.

To be fair I'll include a story about a male research fraudster, this one relatively recent. The unusual aspect of this case is he is going to be prosecuted and imprisoned:

That has to be the banking industry which is so rife with corruption and fraud the Obama Administration entered into discussions about nationalizing it.

Your allegations just don't matter.