The paper, titled "Stimulus-triggered fate conversion of somatic cells into pluripotency," was accepted by the British science journal Nature on Dec. 20, 2013, and published online on Jan. 29, 2014. The authors were listed as Haruko Obokata, Teruhiko Wakayama, Yoshiki Sasai, Koji Kojima, Martin P. Vacanti, Hitoshi Niwa, Masayuki Yamato and Charles A. Vacanti.
You can read it here, but be forewarned, you're in for some heavy going: www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7485/full/nature12968.html .
On July 2, after about five months of accusations and recriminations over the veracity of Obokata's findings, Nature announced the paper would be retracted. The incident is now being touted by some media — which appear to have overlooked, or forgotten, the famous Piltdown Man fossil hoax of a century ago — as being the third of sekai sandai netsuzo (the world's three great frauds), the other two being a 2001 paper on single-molecule semiconductors by German physicist Jan Hendrik Schon of Bell Laboratories, and papers in 2004 and 2005 on human embryonic stem cells by Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University.
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