FWIW, Obokata would never have made Nature without Sasai's help, and there's plenty of scurrilous scuttlebutt on the Japanese Internets about Obokata and Sasai

FWIW, Obokata would never have made Nature without Sasai's help, and there's plenty of scurrilous scuttlebutt on the Japanese Internets about Obokata and Sasai possibly being romantically involved. There's a slightly more informed that unusual discussion about the suicide on r/japan, from which I'll quote the first comment in part: Not surprised, actually. Within the last week there was an NHK show on this whole thing, in which it was pointed out how key Sasai was to Obokata's paper. According to the show, the paper had already been rejected by two different outlets for shoddy writing and presentation, and Sasai was called in to clean it up - he did, Nature accepted the paper for publication, and the rest is history. But several scientists NHK got to sit down on camera and read over the Nature article all said basically the same thing: "Sasai sure knows how to write an attractive paper, but the contents are garbage." Things like possible flaws with the samples or data would be defacto admitted, but glossed over with a simple "We checked the STAP cells to see if they were not another kind of man-made stem cell" - but then never stated what the results of that check were (and it seems to have turned out the "STAP" cells were stem cells that for some reason Obokata had stocks of in her office). These same scientists on the show were saying that if Obokata's results could not be independently duplicated, Sasai had just destroyed his entire career and Riken itself was going to be in a world of hurt as Sasai was instrumental in getting grants and funding for them. I feel bad for Sasai's family. As for Sasai himself, I hope Obokata was worth it. http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/2cnjq8/obokatas_supervisor_commits_suicide_at_riken_kobe/ http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/2cnjq8/obokatas_super...