Sometimes retraction watch becomes suicide watch: The toxic combination of a sense of disgrace, and a culture in which suicide is seen by some as a form of atonement, has brought a distinguished Japanese scientist to self-destruction.
Yoshiki Sasai killed himself at his laboratory, where he oversaw – and appeared as co-author on – the now-notorious, apparently totally bogus stem cell work (“the researchers reported that they successfully transformed ordinary mouse cells into versatile stem cells by exposing them to a mildly acidic environment”) of Haruko Obokata. Accused of bearing significant responsibility for Obokata’s misconduct, which brought negative international attention to Japanese science, Sasai apparently fell into a depression.
August 5th, 2014 at 6:46PM
Somewhere between American shamelessness over just about everything (rape, corruption, plagiarism) and Japanese shame-as-atonement there’s got to be a happy medium. Resignation from a highly-paid position and devoting oneself to useful but less remunerative work, perhaps?
August 6th, 2014 at 7:00AM
John Profumo probably set the benchmark for this, and what he did wasn’t even all that terrible by today’s standards.