Stanford President will resign--Report found flaws in his research

[Langue_doc]

Stanford President Will Resign After Report Found Flaws in His Research
Marc Tessier-Lavigne was cleared of accusations of scientific fraud and misconduct. But the review said his work had "multiple problems" and "fell below customary standards of scientific rigor."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/stanford-president-resigns-tessier-lavigne.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20230719&instance_id=97927&nl=from-the-times&regi_id=46382589&segment_id=139735&te=1&user_id=349c6abacc09730a88f6caaeae2eed71

The first few paragraphs:

Following months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he would resign as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in studies he supervised going back decades.

The review, conducted by an outside panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claim involving Dr. Tessier-Lavigne's work — that an important 2009 Alzheimer's study was the subject of an investigation that found falsified data and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had covered it up.

The panel concluded that the claims, published in February by The Stanford Daily, the campus newspaper, "appear to be mistaken" and that there was no evidence of falsified data, or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had otherwise engaged in fraud.

But the review also stated that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had "multiple problems" and "fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process," especially for a paper of such potential consequences.

As a result of the review, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said he would retract a 1999 paper that appeared in the journal Cell and two others that appeared in Science in 2001. Two other papers published in Nature, including the 2009 Alzheimer's study, would also undergo what was described as comprehensive correction.

[Sun_Worshiper]

I don't have time to dig into it right now, but I'd like to know more about this:

But the review also stated that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had "multiple problems" and "fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process," especially for a paper of such potential consequences.

What kinds of problems are we talking about here? If it is just a mediocre study with some flaws in the design, then that doesn't seem like grounds to retract or to step down.

[Wahoo Redux]

Lauded scientist and president of a premier university. 

Then having your work debunked and stepping down from your post in front of the whole world. 

I don't really have any good insights...but OUCH!!!  That's gotta hurt.

[kaysixteen]

So did he or did he not do anything fraudulent, or is he just incompetent?

[bio-nonymous]

ttps://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188828810/stanford-university-president-resigns

He is still "ethical enough" to continue as a biology professor at Stanford, but not to remain president. The claim, as per usual, is that "others" in his lab manipulated data and he didn't know about it (12 papers are in question, 5 of which he was the principal author)--although he admits he "should have been more proactive" in pursuing corrections of his work. These are not insignificant studies, they were published in Nature, Cell and Science.

IHE report

https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resigns-over-manipulated-research-will-retract-at-least-3-papers/

[Dismal]

Impressive that the student newspaper reporting was led by a 19 year old student reporter. True that his dad works for the New York Times...

[Langue_doc]

Marc Tessier-Lavigne failed to address manipulated papers, fostered unhealthy lab dynamic, Stanford report says

From the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resigns-over-manipulated-research-will-retract-at-least-3-papers/

Some excerpts from the article:

"At various times when concerns with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne's papers emerged—in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-2016, and March 2021—Dr. Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record,"  Stanford's report said, identifying a number of apparent manipulations in Tessier-Lavigne's neuroscientific research.

The report concluded that the fudging of results under Tessier-Lavigne's purview "spanned labs at three separate institutions." It identified a culture where Tessier-Lavigne "tended to reward the 'winners' (that is, postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the 'losers' (that is, postdocs who were unable or struggled to generate such data)."

The report identified "repeated instances of manipulation of research data and/or subpar scientific practices from different people and in labs run by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at different institutions."

However, potential witnesses — who include five high-level executives and scientists at Genentech — have alleged in previous reporting by The Daily that there was indeed fraud in the 2009 paper and that Tessier-Lavigne was made aware in 2011 that scientists within Genentech had attempted to reproduce the findings and concluded its findings to be invalid. Tessier-Lavigne has denied this characterization and Genentech has contested the executives' and scientists' version of events. Each executive and scientist had spoken with The Daily about two separate instances in Tessier-Lavigne's lab — the two the report suggested had been confused. Four of those people also spoke about a third instance of alleged fraud that they said resulted in another scientist under Tessier-Lavigne's lab leaving the company.

The Stanford investigators were informed of this third alleged incident in a February email obtained by The Daily. The third allegation does not appear in the report, and witnesses with relevant knowledge about what happened say they were not asked about it during interviews.

"Within weeks after the publication of" a 2001 article in the journal Science now thought to contain doctored imagery, the report said, a colleague in the field identified an error. "Dr. Tessier-Lavigne stated to the colleague in writing that he would take corrective action, including both contacting the journal and attempting to issue a correction.... He did not contact the journal and he did not attempt to issue an erratum, which is inadequate."

The report noted that Tessier-Lavigne had not followed up for seven years on unpublished corrections to two of his papers in Science, concluding that "Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not have an explanation for deciding to not follow up on the corrections beyond that he has a practice of drafting many emails to see how they read but only sends a portion of them and that he concluded the communication was unnecessary," the report said. "To date, the scientific record remains uncorrected."

[Puget]

This yet again shows the importance of lab culture, and really emphasizing integrity and replicability above "positive" results.

[quasihumanist]

Unfortunately, administration tends to select for people who care more about winning friends and influencing people than about finding out the truth.

I think the best explanation is not any sort of intentional malfeasance on his part but rather general indifference to keeping the scientific record correct.

[financeguy]

It's unfortunate that this comes at a time when many Americans do not trust scientists. The debacle over pressure behind the paper indicating Covid could not have originated from a lab rather than wet market, not to mention various bad faith actors in "fluff" non-scientific fields leads many to discount anything that comes from an academic publication entirely or at a minimum equate it with an opinion piece in a popular publication.