STAP stem cells

(Kyodo News / Associated Press)

The world is reeling from the apparent suicide of Robin Williams. As someone who has suffered with debilitating depression, I could probably add quite a bit to the already expansive commentary. All I will say is that if you feel, on a regular basis, that your family and the world would be better off without you, that is your depression LYING to you. Even though you may think that it is, your perception is not reality. Please seek help right away. And if you are already under the care of a medical professional, please tell them that you need to try something else. There is hope. You can crawl out from the crushing weight of the pain and sadness.

Robin Williams is not the only "celebrity" suicide that has happened recently. Earlier this month, Yoshiki Sasai, a Japanese researcher involved with the STAP (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency) research hanged himself at his research lab, the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology.

You may remember the STAP breakthrough from earlier this year. Nature published two papers that claimed that pluripotent stem cells could be made simply by placing cells in an acid bath. The stem cell research world went crazy. There seemed to be endless stories about the Japanese scientists who pulled off this amazing feat. They were instant celebrities.

Then, it was found the papers had errors. Results could not be duplicated. The Los Angeles Times has more:

At first, scientists hailed the creation of the so-called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP, stem cells. But within days, serious questions arose about the researchers’ methods, leading to a RIKEN investigation that found several instances of scientific misconduct on that part of study leader Haruko Obokata, a rising scientist at RIKEN.

Both studies were retracted in July.

Sasai was Obokata’s supervisor and was supposed to oversee her writing, Japan Times reported. RIKEN faulted Sasai for failing to check the data used in the study and for providing weak oversight that allowed Obokata to submit a manuscript with manipulated images and other serious problems.

Science, in the form of nameless scientists, is already considered infallible by many in our society.  Adding fame and a rock star image to the mix, I find scary and tasteless. Scientists are people too. They are subject to the same pressures, desires and weaknesses as the rest of us. Do we really want scientists to be rock stars with "sex, drugs and rock and roll" as the mantra?  I don't. I want them to be geeked-out and holed up in their labs doing whatever their grant money is for.

Talk about speedy work. Hot on the heels of the news that simply dipping adult mouse cells in acid could turn them into cells with the potential to turn into any cell in the body, it appears that the same thing may have been done using human cells.

The picture above, given to New Scientist by Charles Vacanti at Harvard Medical School, is said to be images of the first human "STAP cell" experiments....

Now, Vacanti and his colleagues say they have taken human fibroblast cells and tested several environmental stressors on them in an attempt to recreate human STAP cells. He won't reveal what type of stressors were applied but he says the resulting cells appears similar in form to the mouse STAP cells. His team is in the process of testing to see just how stem-cell-like these cells are.

"The process was very similar to the one we used on mouse cells, but we used human dermal fibroblasts that we purchased commercially," Dr Vacanti said. "I can confirm that stem cells were made when we treated these human cells. They do the same thing [as the mouse cells].

"They revert back to stem cells, and we believe the stem cells are not a contamination in the sample that we were inadvertently sent by the company, but that they are being made, although we still have to do the final tests to prove this," he added.

"The team haven't just made pluripotent cells like embryonic stem cells," says José Silva from the University of Cambridge, "they appear to have made totipotent cells." This means the cells have been rewound to a state with even more flexibility than pluripotent cells, which means they should be easier to manipulate. The only cells known to be totipotent – able to form an embryo and a placenta – in the body are those that have only undergone the first couple of cell divisions immediately after fertilisation. "They are like precursors to embryonic stem cells," says Silva.

"The word totipotent brings up all kinds of issues," says Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Marlborough, Massachusetts. "If these cells are truly totipotent, and they are reproducible in humans then they can implant in a uterus and have the potential to be turned into a human being. At that point you're entering into a right-to-life quagmire"

Asked whether it would be possible in theory to follow on from the mouse research to show that skin cells could be turned into viable human embryos – effectively a clone of the donor of the skin samples – Dr Vacanti said: "This is an offshoot, an unintended consequence, so the answer is 'yes' …. This would be the natural conclusion, but I won't be the one that does it."

"The reprogramming step seems to be quite simple, it could be very inexpensive technology for reproductive medicine," agrees Lanza. "But it has more potential for abuse than iPS cells. It'll be interesting how this all plays out, but if it's possible to do this in humans, it changes everything."