FLICKR, RAINER STROPEKIn a post to his department’s website dated September 3, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Charles Vacanti, who was a coauthor on the two now-retracted stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) studies, detailed a new protocol for generating these stem cells. Vacanti first published a revised protocol to the Brigham and Women’s website in March, at a time when several researchers were reporting difficulties replicating his team’s results following the methods that were published two months earlier in Nature. The new protocol includes the additional use of “ATP as a supplemental source of energy with two very effective stresses to achieve the desired result,”Vacanti and his coauthor Koji Kojima wrote.
In February, as suspicions were raised online regarding figures from the publications, Vacanti told The Scientist: “I believe that these concerns are a result of minor errors that occurred in the manuscript editing process and do not affect the overall content of the published reports, the scientific data, or the conclusions.”
Following the procedure Vacanti posted in March, Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Kenneth Lee and his colleagues reported on ResearchGate having achieved limited success. Later that same week, however, Lee wrote: “Personally, I don’t think STAP cells exist and it will be a waste of manpower and research funding to carry on with this experiment any further.”
Still, Vacanti stood behind the STAP method, even as lead author Haruko Obokata was found by her ...
