This is such a tragedy. I think a couple of comments should be made. First, we truly lost a fantastic member of the stem cell community. His lab produced some

This is such a tragedy. I think a couple of comments should be made. First, we truly lost a fantastic member of the stem cell community. His lab produced some of the most ambitious and amazing directed differentiation of stem cells into neural tissues including the retina (see an old news story here [1]). Whether or not he was deeply involved in this latest STAP cell controversy is immaterial to the tremendous contributions his lab has made to the field. Second, we should be more careful on how we as a scientific community react to scientific scandal. Michael Eisen (UC Berkeley DevBio Prof, HHMI, Founder of PLoS), who's father committed suicide in a similar incident many years ago, had some poignant comments [2]. [1] http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker-1.11232 http://www.nature.com/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker... [2] http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1619 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1619