Mystery surrounds lab death

Nature 443, 253(21 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/443253a; Published online 20 September 2006
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/...ll/443253a.html

Mystery surrounds lab death
Ichiko Fuyuno and David Cyranoski, Tokyo

Japanese biologist found poisoned at his bench.


On 1 September, Yasuo Kawasaki, a 42-year-old assistant professor at Osaka University, was found dead in his lab after ingesting poison. The investigation into the case so far has left many questions unanswered — including whether the death was connected to a recently withdrawn article on which Kawasaki was a co-author.

That paper suggested that a type of DNA helicase called MCM2p plays an important role in DNA replication (W. Nakai et al. J. Biol. Chem. 10.1074/jbc.M603586200; 2006). It was published online on 12 July. But on 2 August, the journal marked it as "withdrawn".

Osaka University began an investigation on 9 August into whether the paper contained false data. In the midst of the inquiry, Kawasaki's body was found — police suspect that his death was a suicide, although they are still working on the case.

Many who knew Kawasaki have expressed surprise and shock at his death. "He was a talented young scientist," says John Diffley, an expert in DNA replication at Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute, who knew him since Kawasaki was a postdoc at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "His career seemed to be going very well."

Hisato Kondoh, dean of the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences at Osaka, dismisses any suspicion that Kawasaki might have killed himself after being caught engaging in scientific misconduct. "The person who committed suicide was not involved in scientific fraud," he says. Kondoh declined to comment further on the ongoing investigation into the paper, saying only that the results will be made public when they are complete.

But the events leading up to the withdrawal of the paper are far from clear. Nature has learned that Akio Sugino, head of Kawasaki's lab and corresponding author on the paper, had submitted it for publication without checking with all of his co-authors. According to Japanese press reports, Kawasaki subsequently found that some of his data had been changed, so he asked Sugino to withdraw the article, and informed Kondoh. The university is also investigating several other related papers from the group.

Sugino was not available for comment. Robert Simoni, deputy editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, also declined Nature's request for information about why the paper was withdrawn, and refused to clarify how a withdrawal differs from a retraction. But scientists in the field describe Sugino as well respected and of high integrity — "a venerable old hand at DNA replication" as Diffley puts it.

Some of the details surrounding Kawasaki's death are also mysterious. Although suicide is relatively common in Japan, the cause of death tends to be hanging or gassing. Kawasaki died from ingesting sodium azide, a white, odourless solid that causes convulsions and respiratory failure within minutes. Such a method of suicide is extremely rare in Japan, according to National Police Agency statistics.

The suicide note was also unusual — rather than being handwritten, it was printed out from a computer. And despite being addressed to his family, it was found, along with an empty container of sodium azide, in the lab where Kawasaki's body was discovered. According to the Osaka police department, the note was an explanation of Kawasaki's emotions. It did not mention the withdrawn paper or specific problems at work. It began: "Things at work have settled down. I want to resolve the problem."

When asked about rumours that there was intense pressure on Kawasaki before his death, Kondoh said that measures had been in place to protect whistleblowers since the beginning of the incident. He added that there is no evidence of a connection between the apparent suicide and the withdrawn paper.

I really hope the university gets to the bottom of this. It will be a shame if it is a whitewash.
Japanese universities often respond slowly to suspicions of fraud, and aren't known for their transparency. Diffley says he now hopes Osaka will buck that trend. "I really hope the university gets to the bottom of what happened," he says. "It will be a shame if it is a whitewash." He points out that without a definitive investigation result, rumours of misconduct could blight the whole group. "The careers of many scientists will be affected."

Kiyoshi Kurokawa, president of the Science Council of Japan, agrees. "Japanese universities and institutions may not always take the right approach to resolving problems," he says. "But do they realize that the science community around the world is watching?"



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I do think it was suicide, Japanese are famous for offing themselves. But the circumstances may indicate he was put or coerced into a position where he was more likely to commit suicide. Whether this was intentional or not, it doesnt speak much for the way Japanese treat their researchers. Especially the ones (accused of) making mistakes.

Brain electrodes conjure up ghostly visions

Published online: 20 September 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060918-4
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060918/full/060918-4.html

Brain electrodes conjure up ghostly visions

Simple stimulation may underpin complex mental illusions.
Michael Hopkin

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Brain stimulation can trigger the spooky feeling of a shadowy person lurking behind you.


Punchstock

Simple stimulation of the brain can cause the mind to play complex and creepy tricks on itself, neurologists have discovered. They found that, by inserting electrodes into a specific part of the brain, they could induce a patient to sense that an illusory 'shadow person' was lurking behind her and mimicking her movements.

Doctors treating the patient, a 22-year-old woman with epilepsy, found that when they stimulated a brain region called the left temporoparietal junction, the patient sensed the presence of a sinister figure behind her who copied her actions. They suspect that the effect is due to the mind projecting its own movements onto a phantom figure conjured up by the brain, an effect that is seen in some patients with serious psychiatric conditions.

"It was quite astonishing — she definitely realized the 'person' was taking the same posture as she did, but she didn't make the connection," says Olaf Blanke of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who led the research. "To her it remained a different person, an alien — exactly what you find in schizophrenics."

The patient had no history of psychiatric problems. So the results suggest that this type of illusion, despite being an apparently complex psychiatric symptom, can be caused by a very simple switch in the brain. The mechanism might help to explain schizophrenic feelings such as paranoia, alien control, and the notion that parts of one's body belong to somebody else.

The phenomenon may also be linked to the 'out-of-body' experiences reported by many people. Previously, Blanke's group has shown that similar brain stimulation can induce a sensation that one is rising up out of one's body (see 'Electrodes trigger out-of-body experience').


Extrasensory perception

Doctors were investigating the patient's brain in preparation for an operation to remove scar tissue that was causing persistent epileptic fits. Up to a third of adult epileptics suffer in this way and cannot be helped by drugs.

The team inserted electrodes directly into the patient's brain to accurately pinpoint the regions that control language and right-hand movement, to ensure that these were not damaged during the subsequent operation. But in doing so, they accidentally interfered with a brain region that coordinates different sensory information to give a sensation of the body's location in space.

"There's a lot of information coming in from your body to your brain," Blanke explains. If you are talking on the telephone, for instance, you will hear your own voice, feel the handset in your hand, and have feedback from your arm muscles to tell you what position you are in. Your brain integrates the information and forms a picture of where your body is and what it is doing.

But in this patient such integration seems to have been scrambled, Blanke says. For the few seconds that the electrical stimulation was occurring, she described a sensation of a shadowy man hovering behind her. And, as the researchers report in this week's Nature1, when she was asked to lean forward and hug her knees, she said it felt as if the man was (unpleasantly) reaching around to grasp her.

The feeling persisted even though the researchers pointed out that it was her mind playing tricks and projecting its own movements. "She was aware of this, but said it remained quite scary. She still had to turn around to check [there was no one there]," Blanke recalls.


Not me

The work may provide some insight into schizophrenia. Blanke notes that this condition frequently includes problems with perceiving one's own body. In experiments in which subjects view an image of themselves in which one of their arms is rotated by an abnormal amount, for example, schizophrenics will readily declare that the appendage is not theirs. Normal volunteers will disown it only when the rotation reaches about 90° out of normal.

Others caution that this one experiment will have a limited impact on our understanding of such symptoms, however. "Schizophrenia is a syndrome and not a single phenomenon," says Sabine Bahn, a psychiatrist at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Blanke plans to try to replicate the result in other volunteers.

Belgium triangle is A PLANE

OK fellas. When I looked at it I realized it wasnt a triangle straight away. Then I thought it was a V-shaped craft. Then my brain switched on after a hard day working and I realized... it was a plane with landinglights on.




These are indeed normal locations on a place for landinglights.





Im sorry dudes. Its a plane.

Anomaly on the moon

Since we are in the space theme here is another mystery

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d82uUfgbR48

Strange features on Mars

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/ab1_m04/maps/M0400291.gif


At the bottom of the picture. Those 'tubes' sure look odd. NASA claims they are sanddunes, but that is under heavy dispute by many people.

On the other hand I dont believe they are organic lifeforms as some have suggested. I dont know the scale but the pictures where taken from 200 meters and should show quite a large area. Those 'tubes', whatever they are, must be immense. Some people made wild claims that they look like glass tunnels and proposed they are alien transportation systems..

I personally think a possibility is that they are what's left of frozen rivers or canals. Or streams of hot lava which cooled down, and the cracks or rings in the surface results from the expansion and contraction of the material under influence of the sun.

Or maybe they are sanddunes..

Anyone have a better suggestion? Or at least know how large they are?