A study which had claimed to have come up with a new fast, easy, inexpensive and uncontroversial method of produce stem cells has now been retracted.

According to CNN, scientists had taken a skin cell and coaxed it into acting like an embryo, producing embryonic-like stem cells that could theoretically be turned into any cell in the body. What was described as a 'breakthrough' is how these cells were coaxed, by placing them in an acidic bath.

But the researchers, who had announced the results in January 2014, have now stated in their retraction that their papers had "several critical errors" in their study data.

An investigation into the studies was started by the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Japan in February 2014, and the institution said its investigators had "categorized some of the errors as misconduct."

In fact, one of the co-authors of the study had also called for a retraction in March, because he questioned some of the data that were used in the experiments, which led to the creation of so-called STAP cells (or stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency cells).

In an editorial accompanying the retraction, it was written that the errors were found in the figures, parts of the methods descriptions were found to be plagiarized, and early attempts to replicate the work failed.

The investigation found that data supposedly representing different cells and different embryos in the study were actually describing the same cells and the same embryos.

The study was published in the journal Nature, which is now accompanied by the retraction of all co-authors.

(Posted on 03-07-2014)

Read more:
Results for 'breakthrough' stem cell study taken back