Suicide is a deep-rooted reaction to disgrace in many cultures, and at least in pop-culture stereotypes Japanese culture is an outlier in this regard. I cannot judge the over-all validity of those stereotypes, but they do naturally come to mind with news of the death of Yoshiki Sasai, deputy director of the Center for Development Biology, part of the Riken center, in Japan. Sasai supervised recent research into stem cells that seemed for a brief heady time to constitute a great breakthrough. A younger scientist working under him got the lead-author credit on the key paper, but there was plenty of limelight to go around while it lasted. The apparent breakthrough, in January of this year, was the discovery of stimuli, external stressors, that could trigger the return of specialized, a/k/a differentiated cells back to the "pluripotency" of the stem cell state. Their process involved bathing blood cells in acid at a specified temperature -- 37 C. My quick math t...