After months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced on Wednesday that he will resign as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found several flaws in the study that he has been conducting for decades.
The review, conducted by an external panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claims involving the work of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne – that an important 2009 study on Alzheimer’s was the subject of an investigation that found fake data and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne covered it. upwards.
The panel concluded that the claims “appear to be false” and that there was no evidence of falsified data or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne otherwise engaged in fraud.
But the review also said the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had “numerous problems” and “fell below conventional standards of scientific rigor and process, ” especially in a potentially important role.
As a result of the review, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne is expected to request several corrections to the 2009 paper, published in Nature, as well as a study in Nature. He also said he would seek retraction of a 1999 paper that appeared in the journal Cell and two others that appeared in Science in 2001.
Stanford is known for its leadership in scientific research, and although claims involving work published before the arrival of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at the university in 2016, the accusations reflect poorly on the integrity of the university.
In a statement describing his reasons for resigning, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said, “I hope that there will be an ongoing discussion about the report and its conclusions, at least in the near term, which may lead to a debate about my ability to lead the university. in the new academic year .”
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne will step down as president at the end of August but will remain at the university as a tenured professor of biology. As president, he started the university’s first new school in 70 years, the climate-focused Doerr School of Sustainability. A renowned neuroscientist, he published more than 220 papers, mainly on the cause and treatment of degenerative brain diseases.
The university named Richard Saller, a professor of European studies, as interim president, effective Sept.
The Stanford panel’s 89-page report, based on more than 50 interviews and a review of more than 50,000 documents, concluded that members of Dr. five papers listing Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as principal author.
On several occasions, the panel found, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne took insufficient steps to correct the errors, and it questioned her decision not to seek a correction in the 2009 paper after follow-up studies revealed that the main finding this is wrong.
The errors cited by the panel involved a total of 12 papers, including seven in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne is listed as co-author.
The accusations against Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, 63, first emerged years ago on PubPeer, an online crowdsourcing site for publishing and discussing scientific work.
But they resurfaced after the student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, published a series of articles questioning the work being done in laboratories run by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne. In November, The Stanford Daily reported claims that images had been manipulated in published papers listing Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as lead author or co-author.
In February, The Stanford Daily published more serious claims of fraud involving a 2009 paper published by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne while a senior scientist at Genentech. It said that an investigation by Genentech found that the study contained falsified data, and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne tried to hide its findings.
It also said a postdoctoral researcher working on the study was caught by Genentech falsifying data. Dr. Tessier-Lavigne and the former researcher, now a medical doctor practicing in Florida, strongly denied the claims, relying heavily on unnamed sources.
The review panel said The Stanford Daily’s claim that “Genentech conducted a fraud investigation and made a finding of fraud” in the study “appears to be false.” No such investigation was conducted, the report said, but it noted that the panel did not identify several unnamed sources cited in the story.
Kaushikee Nayudu, the editor-in-chief and president of The Stanford Daily, said in a statement Wednesday that the newspaper stood by its reporting.
In response to the newspaper’s initial report about the manipulated studies in November, Stanford’s board of trustees formed a special committee to investigate the claims, chaired by Carol Lam, a Stanford trustee and former federal prosecutor. The special committee then engaged Mark Filip, a former federal judge in Illinois, and his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, to conduct the review.
In January, it was announced that Mr. Filip had enlisted a five-member scientific panel – which included a Nobel laureate and former president of Princeton – to examine the claims from a scientific perspective.
Genentech called the 2009 study a breakthrough, with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne described the findings during a presentation to Genentech investors as a new and different way of looking at the Alzheimer’s disease process.
The study points to what is said to be a previously unknown role of a protein in the brain – Death Receptor 6 – in the development of Alzheimer’s.
As with many new Alzheimer’s theories, a central finding of the study was found to be incorrect. After years of trying to duplicate the results, Genentech finally abandoned the line of inquiry.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne left Genentech in 2011 to lead Rockefeller University, but, with the company, published subsequent work that identified the failure to confirm key areas of research.
Recently, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne told the industry publication Stat News that there were inconsistencies in the results of the experiments, which he blamed on impure protein samples.
The failure of his laboratory to ensure the purity of the samples was one of the problems with the scientific process cited by the panel, although it was learned that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne the problems of the time. It called the decision of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not correct the original paper as “suboptimal” but within the limits of scientific practice.
In his statement, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said she had earlier tried to issue corrections to the Cell and Science papers but that Cell refused to publish a correction and Science failed to publish one after agreeing to do so. thus.
The panel’s findings echo a report released in April by Genentech, which said its own internal review of The Stanford Daily’s claims did not find any evidence of “fraud , fabrication, or other intentional wrong.”
Much of the Stanford panel report is a detailed appendix that analyzes the images of the 12 published papers in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne has served as author or co-author, some dating back 20 years.
In the papers, the panel found several instances of the images being duplicated or spliced but concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not participate in the manipulation, did not know it at the time, and there is no doubt about the failure to identify. they.
Dr. Matthew Schrag, an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University who in February flagged problems with the 2009 Alzheimer’s study, said the publication of the study illustrates how scientific journals sometimes give prominent researchers the benefit of the doubt when reviewing their studies.
For senior scientists running busy labs, Dr. Schrag said, it can be difficult to examine every piece of data produced by the many junior researchers they supervise. But, he said, “I think the accumulation of problems will rise to a level that requires some management.”
Dr. Schrag, stressing that he was speaking for himself and not Vanderbilt, said Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was reasonable, as was his tenure on the faculty. He noted that many of the discoveries of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne has proven and helped unravel critical mysteries in neuroscience.
“I have some mixed feelings about the heat he’s taking, because I don’t think he’s the key player at fault here,” said Dr. Schrag. “I think he has a responsibility to do more than he did, but that also doesn’t mean he’s not trying to do the right thing.”
Oliver Wang, Benjamin Muller and Katie Robertson contributed to the report.
