WIKIMEDIA, STEMCELLSCIENTISTStudies on stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) that were published—and then retracted—earlier this year in Nature had apparently been reviewed and rejected by a number of other journals, including Science and Cell. The blog Retraction Watch has now published the full reviews and rejection letter of the paper that had been submitted to Science.
“The reviews are full of significant questions and doubts about the work, as would be expected in a rejection,” Retraction Watch cofounder Ivan Oransky wrote.
For instance, Reviewer 1 states: “This is such an extraordinary claim that a very high level of proof is required to sustain it and I do not think this level has been reached. I suspect that the results are artifacts derived from the following processes: (1) the tendency of cells with GFP reporters to go green as they are dying. (2) the ease of cross contamination of cell lines kept in the same lab.”
Paul Knoepfler, writing on his Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog, pointed out that “Crucially, this same reviewer noticed the gel splice, later present in the accepted ...
