Haruko Obokata's STAP Cell Scandal

Haruko Obokata's STAP cell scandal remains one of science's most tragic frauds, partly due to its devastating personal toll. In 2014, Obokata and co-authors published two Nature papers claiming that simple acid baths, as gentle as pH 5.7, could reprogram adult mammalian cells into pluripotent stem cells. The claim was stunning—far more dramatic than the typical 0.1% efficiency of induced pluripotency—but it was also entirely fabricated. Multiple labs worldwide failed to replicate the results, and a subsequent investigation found falsified images and plagiarized text in the papers, which Nature retracted. Unlike Theranos, which primarily impacted investors and patients, Obokata's fraud cost a life: her mentor Yoshiki Sasai committed suicide. The scandal set back stem cell research by at least two years and wasted an estimated $25 million in grant funding across Japan.