Yesterday in the journal Nature was published an obituary of Dr. Yoshiki Sasai, who was one of Japans top stem cell scientists at RIKEN but died at the age of 52 after an apparent suicide following the STAP cell research scandal. Something that should not have happened has happened, which leads not only to the invaluable loss of a brilliant talent and an irreplaceable researcher to the global scientific community but also to the undeserved reputation of his outstanding legacy of pioneering works among the general public. Although Im not very familiar with his studies, Id like to introduce some of the obituaries posted in academic journals by his colleagues as well as one news article in Nature in 2012 which briefly summarized the breakthrough achievements of Dr. Sasai. Ive also quoted some memorable passages from each article that are not too technical for everyone to appreciate, and I hope these articles will help him, if only slightly, gain well-deserved respect and sympathy for himself and many splendid achievements in his career. ▽Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, OBITUARY: Yoshiki Sasai (1962-2014), Nature, 513, 34 (2014). nature/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/513034a.html Quotes: My first experience of his pride and passion came during a long walk on Japans Rokko Mountain in 2008. We looked over the splendour of Kobe and the reclaimed island where his institute, the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, lay. The sight brought that smile to his face. As he taught me the art of ninja walking, recounted the local thousand-year-old methods used to make sake, and dissected the etiquette of Japanese bathing, he explained some of his incredible scientific discoveries. Given the pride that Yoshiki felt for the work he was doing in his home country, his enjoyment of and devotion to good science, his family, and life in general, I was shocked to learn that on 5 August my admired colleague and dear friend had taken his own life. Clearly, his mental state took a very heavy blow from the onslaught of media attention and the months of allegations surrounding two Nature papers published in January from the laboratory of Haruko Obokata, on the generation of stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP). Yoshikis career was full of insights that prompted the unique smile that we will greatly miss. I hope that his realized and unrealized ideas inspire the next generations of scientists to follow his solid legacy of research. It is a true tragedy that the scientific community is left without this forward thinker. ▽David Cyranoski, NEWS: Stem-cell scientists mourn loss of brain engineer, Nature (2014). nature/news/stem-cell-scientists-mourn-loss-of-brain-engineer-1.15679 Quotes: He sees things that others don’t see, developmental biologist Edward De Robertis told Nature when we interviewed him in 2012 for a story about Sasais research. De Robertis, of the University of California, Los Angeles, supervised Sasai’s postdoctoral work in the mid-1990s, and recalled Sasai once retyping a lost manuscript word-for-word, from memory. “I’d never seen anything like that,” he said. Peers say that Sasai should have taken more care to ensure the reproducibility of such extraordinary claims, and that he was guilty of overhyping the research when it was first announced. But those who knew Sasai think it was a rare lapse. Leyns, who got to know Sasai during pizza lab seminars at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that Sasai was always the one to insist on independent confirmation. He may have dropped the ball on a story which was not his core research field [STAP], but, knowing him, I have not the slightest doubt about his scientific integrity. This is a great loss to science and regenerative medicine in particular. A tremendous loss for his family, says Coffey. Leyns remembers Sasai as a loving father who left the lab in the early evening to go home to share good moments with his young kids at bath and bed time and then came back to the lab to work late, adding, My thoughts go first to his very kind wife and children. ▽Edward M. De Robertis, Yoshiki Sasai 1962–2014, Cell (2014). sciencedirect/science/article/pii/S0092867414010940# Quotes: Yoshiki was a man of rectitude and a scientist of high personal integrity, following in the line of samurai ancestors. He always assumed responsibility. Since his post-doctoral studies, he was called Sensei, which means teacher, by those who knew him well. It was an affectionate sign of the high respect in which this scholar was held. In the San Francisco airport, as Yoshiki was retrieving his luggage, a person approached his wife asking for directions. While holding her baby, she pointed to the directions while an envelope containing their passports and a few thousand dollars was being stolen from her baggage cart. Thus, while immigrating into a new country, starting a new job, finding an apartment, and cloning an important gene, Yoshiki was shuttling back and forth to the Japanese consulate to obtain new passports. When I asked him some time later how the United States compared to Japan, he responded that it was like Through the Looking Glass, the Lewis Carroll sequel to Alice in Wonderland. By this, he meant that everything seemed like the mirror image of what one might expect. After we had written the paper together, Yoshiki accidentally erased the entire manuscript file while I was out of town. He asked my secretary not to tell and rewrote the entire manuscript from memory. I only realized this when I found one or two words that had changed from the original. He had an amazing photographic memory. ▽Stefano Piccolo, Yoshiki Sasai: stem cell Sensei, Development, 141, 1 (2014). dev.biologists.org/content/early/2014/08/21/dev.116509.full.pdf+html Quotes: The scientific community mourns the loss of one of its giants. But for those of us fortunate enough to have enjoyed Yoshiki’s friendship, or to have been transformed by his teachings and intellectual intensity, the grief of his death is devastating. At our first meeting, he effortlessly noted down a long list of ‘to-do’ experiments, with such rigor, logic and in-depth analysis of potential pitfalls and necessary controls to leave me at the same time captivated and intimidated. I still have those lab notes with me! Yoshiki had a unique ability to see things clearly while others were left wandering in the dark. Creative intuition was then coupled with an ability to conceive straightforward experimental approaches, many requiring a patient, almost ritual, optimization in perfect Japanese style. Those who met Yoshiki on the conference circuit will certainly remember that he was an outstanding lecturer. His talks were perfectly punctuated with wit and a sense of playfulness. Others may have met him in the evenings of the many symposia organized at his institute as the exuberant RIKEN bartender (he expected tips, too!). The more private Yoshiki was a positive, charismatic and generous man. And it was impossible to resist being fascinated by a man who could talk passionately about so many diverse things, whether the topic was Japanese culture, the delicacies of an Italian risotto or evolutionary plasticity. ▽David Cyranoski, NEWS: Tissue engineering: The brainmaker, Nature (2012). nature/news/tissue-engineering-the-brainmaker-1.11232 Quotes: A bit stiff in movement and reserved in manner, Sasai nevertheless puts on a theatrical show with a cocktail shaker at parties held by his institute after international symposia. “My second job is bartender,” he says, without a trace of a smile. It is, however, the cocktails he mixes in 96-well culture plates that have earned him scientific acclaim. All it took to grow a retina, it turned out, were a few tweaks, such as a reduction in the concentration of growth factors and the addition of a standard cell-culture ingredient called Matrigel. The result closely mimics eye development in the embryo. By the sixth day in culture, the brain balls start sprouting balloon-like growths of retinal cells, which then collapse in on themselves to make the double-walled optic cups. Sasais team snip them off — like taking an apple from a tree, says Sasai — transfer them to a different culture and let them be. Two weeks later, the cups have formed all six layers of the retina, an architecture that resembles the eye of an 8-day-old mouse (which, at that age, is still blind). That the cells could drive themselves through this dramatic biomechanical process without surrounding tissues to support them1 stunned Sasai as much as anyone else. When I saw it, I thought, Oh my god. Shape, topology and size are all recapitulated, he says. Carefully explaining the pun to come, he adds: In English, when you are surprised, you say eye-popping — so we really thought this was eye-popping. Sasai hopes to improve on his early efforts by growing a better pituitary gland, equipped with a blood supply; a cerebral cortex with all six layers of tissue; and photoreceptors mature enough to detect light. But his next major task is to culture a cerebellum, which will involve growing and integrating three tissues of different embryonic origins. The matchmaker is already at work, trying to conjure up the right atmosphere. When a boy meets a girl, they start their own story — but not in a large auditorium full of people, he says. You need to put them on a beach or in a disco. Our system is simply going to create this environment. I dont want to be a parts-maker, making more and more tissues, says Sasai. I always want something conceptually different.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 08:31:15 +0000
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