What happens to human cells if you douse them in a Petri dish full of public shame, official reprimands and months of intense stress? An answer came this week when Yoshiki Sasai, a distinguished stem-cell biologist at the R/KEN Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, hanged himself after being blamed over the fabrication of research.
    Dr. Sasai had been an author, with Haruko Obokata, a younger, female colleague whose work he was supervising and promoting, of two papers published in January in <em>Nature</em>. These promised a leap forward in the much-hyped field of regenerative medicine. They purported to show that applying stress to ordinary mouse cells—squeezing them, or dipping them into a bath of mild acid—could turn them into pluripotent stem cells, capable of forming new animal tissue.
    Many other scientists therefore tried to replicate it in the months following publication. But they could not, and doubts grew. Blogs and websites pointed out irregularities in the images and diagrams in the original papers. Finally, in April, an investigative panel at the RIKEN Centre slammed Dr. Obokata for fabrication and plagiarism, and in July <em>Nature</em> retracted the papers.
    The panel did clear Dr. Sasai of misconduct, but it laid upon him a "heavy responsibility" for failing to verify his star researcher's study. He was a keen fundraiser for stem-cell research at R/KEN, which is one of Japan's biggest research organisations, with laboratories all around the country, and that motive may explain his failure to scrutinise her work properly, according to another probe, by outside experts. Disciplinary action against him was expected, and the outsiders called for the Centre for Developmental Biology to be shut down. In April Dr. Sasai told the <em>Wall Street Journal</em> that he was "overwhelmed with shame".
    But some shame surely also attaches to the scientific establishment's handling of the scandal—particularly in a country where suicide is common. The Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog, a website which has followed the implosion of the papers closely, called this week for all scientists to reflect on the pressure researchers are under to make transformative discoveries. Dr. Sasai became a scapegoat, taking too much responsibility for the troubles, it said. Having been briefly in hospital for stress, and on powerful drugs, he had reportedly asked to step aside from his job, only to be turned down. Suicide, unfortunately, is a response that cannot be gainsaid.  The assumption in the first paragraph may indicate ______.