Stem-Cell Pioneer Blamed Media ‘Bashing’ in Suicide Note
August 13, 2014
(Nature) – A note left behind by a Japanese stem-cell researcher before he took his own life blames the storm of media attention around the retraction of two papers for his suicide, a lawyer working for his family said in a press conference. In the days following the tragic death of Yoshiki Sasai on 5 August, scientists, journalists, and bloggers in Japan have been speculating about the reasons behind it. Yoshiki Sasai, a 52-year-old world-renowned stem cell scientist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, had recently been entangled in a controversy over two papers he co-authored. The papers were published in Nature in January, but then retracted in July.