In July the article was later retracted when critical flaws when discovered in her work.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7485/full/nature12968.html
A few weeks later, one of the paper’s co-authors, Yoshiki Sasai, took his own life..
http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cell-pioneer-blamed-media-bashing-in-suicide-note-1.15715
On December 19'th Obokata resigned her position at RIKEN.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientist-resigns-as-stem-cell-creation-method-is-discredited/?WT.mc_id=SA_BS_20141226
We at Nature have considered what lessons we can derive from these flaws. When figures often involve many panels, panels duplicated between figures may, in practice, be impossible for journals to police routinely without disproportionate editorial effort. By contrast, image manipulation is easier to detect. Our policies have always discouraged inappropriate manipulation. However, our approach to policing it was never to do more than to check a small proportion of accepted papers. We are now reviewing our practices to increase such checking greatly, and we will announce our policies when the review is completed.http://www.nature.com/news/stap-retracted-1.15488
No claims have been made that the authors of these paper intentionally manipulated data to achieve the desired result, but the errors resulted from sloppy procedures. This is an another example how the scientific method is self-correcting.
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