What To Know Concerning the Stanford President’s Resignation

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a famend neuroscientist, introduced on Wednesday that he would step down from his place as president of Stanford College, after the discharge of an exterior assessment of his scientific work discovered fault with a number of high-profile journal articles printed below his purview.

A committee drafted the assessment in response to allegations that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was concerned in scientific misconduct. 5 well-known biologists and neuroscientists have been on the committee, together with Randy Schekman, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Drugs, and Shirley Tilghman, who served as president of Princeton College from 2001 to 2013. In its report, which centered on 12 educational papers, the committee mentioned there was no proof that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had knowingly falsified information or withheld such data from the general public.

However the committee famous that “a number of members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over time seem to have manipulated analysis information and/or fallen in need of accepted scientific practices,” declaring a number of errors within the 5 papers for which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had led or overseen the analysis. In response, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne vowed to retract three of the 5 articles, request main corrections for 2 and step down from his place as president.

“I’m gratified that the panel concluded I didn’t interact in any fraud or falsification of scientific information,” Dr. Tessier-Lavigne mentioned in a press release, including: “Though I used to be unaware of those points, I need to be clear that I take accountability for the work of my lab members.”

What have been the allegations?

In 2015, quite a few considerations have been raised on the web site PubPeer concerning the picture information printed in three papers — one within the journal Cell in 1999 and two within the journal Science in 2001 — on which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had served as a lead creator. The considerations different, declaring what seemed to be the digital enhancing and manipulation of picture backgrounds, the duplication of explicit photographs and the creation of composite photographs that obscured the purity of the scientific information.

These considerations have been revisited in 2022 by a number of media retailers, together with Stanford’s pupil newspaper, The Stanford Day by day, which solid additional scrutiny on Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s analysis. The retailers drew consideration to photographs in additional than a dozen completely different papers that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had labored on. Though some photographs appeared to have had little impression on the outcomes of the research, others appeared to have substantively affected the findings.

Because of this, Stanford’s board of trustees opened an investigation into Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s scientific work and arranged the five-member knowledgeable panel to assessment the allegations.

In early 2023, The Stanford Day by day printed additional allegations that, in 2009, when Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was working as an govt on the biotechnology firm Genentech, he had printed a paper within the journal Nature that contained falsified information. Counting on unnamed sources, the scholar newspaper advised {that a} analysis assessment committee had performed an inner investigation at Genentech into the 2009 paper and located proof of knowledge falsification. The Stanford Day by day additionally advised that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had been made conscious of those points however prevented them from being launched to the general public.

Dr. Tessier-Lavigne strongly denied the allegations.

Was there fraud?

After assembly 50 instances and accumulating 50,000 paperwork, the five-member knowledgeable panel launched its findings on Wednesday. It concluded that, though there was picture manipulation and proof of methodological carelessness in every of the papers it examined, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had not engaged in any of this himself and had not “knowingly countenanced others doing so.”

He was additionally absolved of essentially the most severe allegation: information falsification in his 2009 Nature paper. The committee famous that the analysis “lacked the rigor anticipated for a paper of such potential consequence” and decided that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne might have been extra forthright in regards to the paper’s shortcomings, but it surely concluded that the allegations of fraud have been false.

Within the paper, the researchers claimed to have discovered a series response of mind proteins, together with one known as Loss of life Receptor 6, that contributed to the event of Alzheimer’s illness. If the analysis held up, it promised to current a brand new avenue for a greater understanding and remedy of the illness.

“There was some pleasure that this might have been an alternate mind-set in regards to the illness,” mentioned Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt College.

Nevertheless, additional analysis — some printed by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s lab — discovered that the experiments highlighting the function of the DR6 chain response in Alzheimer’s didn’t show what was claimed. This was true, partly, due to unexpected unwanted effects of the inhibitors that have been used within the experiments, in addition to impurities within the proteins that have been used.

The knowledgeable panel advised that, as a substitute of publishing extra articles that disproved the outcomes of the 2009 paper, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne might have issued a direct correction or retraction. However the report decided that the allegations of fraud, first printed in The Stanford Day by day primarily based on the testimony of largely unnamed sources (a few of whom the committee was unable to establish), conflated an unrelated occasion of scientific misconduct in Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s laboratory with the 2009 paper.

Dr. Schrag, who discovered photographs that duplicates within the 2009 research and flagged them publicly in February, mentioned that the research merely was not rigorous sufficient. “The standard of the work was not excessive,” mentioned Dr. Schrag, stressing that he was talking for himself and never his college.

What’s ‘picture manipulation’?

Of the 12 papers the knowledgeable committee reviewed, it discovered “manipulation of analysis information” in practically all of them. In keeping with the report, such manipulation constitutes a variety of practices, together with digitally altering photographs, splicing panels, utilizing information from unrelated experiments, duplicating information and digitally altering the looks of proteins. However the committee granted that a number of the examples of manipulation might have been inadvertent, or have been maybe an try at a “beautification” of the outcomes.

Mike Rossner, president of the biomedical picture manipulation consulting firm Picture Information Integrity, mentioned that he spent 12 years screening manuscripts accepted for publication in The Journal of Cell Biology between 2002 and 2013. He discovered that round 25 p.c of papers “had some kind of manipulation that violated our pointers and needed to be corrected earlier than publication.” In most cases, he mentioned, the problems have been inadvertent and didn’t have an effect on the interpretation of the information. However in about 1 p.c of circumstances the paper wanted to be pulled.

“There’s this sample rising of this not being as uncommon as we need to imagine that it’s,” Dr. Schrag mentioned.

Is ‘laboratory tradition’ responsible?

The various cases of picture manipulation prompted the knowledgeable committee to talk with postdoctoral researchers who had labored below Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at completely different instances and at completely different establishments, together with Stanford and Genentech.

Many praised Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s mental acuity and dedication to scientific rigor, however many additionally described a lab tradition that incentivized good outcomes and profitable experiments. They felt that the lab, and Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that’s, postdocs who might generate favorable outcomes) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that’s, postdocs who have been unable or struggled to generate such information),” the report famous.

The committee decided that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne didn’t need this dynamic, however that it might have contributed to the excessive price of knowledge manipulation that got here out of his labs.

Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, who will step down as president on Aug. 31 however will stay a biology professor at Stanford, mentioned in an e-mail to college students: “Whereas I frequently preserve a important eye on all of the science in my lab, I’ve additionally at all times operated my lab on belief — belief in my college students and postdocs, and belief that the information they have been presenting to me was actual and correct. Going ahead, I will likely be additional tightening controls.”