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After months of careful scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announcement He would step down as president of Stanford University on Wednesday after an independent review of his research revealed major flaws in studies he had overseen for decades.
THE reviewconducted by an outside group of scientists, refuted the most serious claim about Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s work – that an important 2009 Alzheimer’s study was investigated 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 wrong” and that there was no evidence of falsified data or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had otherwise engaged in fraud.
But the review also said the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at biotech company Genentech, had “multiple issues” and “falls short of usual standards of scientific rigor and process”, especially for such an influential paper.
Following the review, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said he would withdraw a 1999 paper that appeared in the journal Cell and two more that appeared in Science in 2001. Two other papers published in Nature, including the 2009 study on Alzheimer’s disease, would also undergo what was described as a full edit.
Stanford is known for its leadership in scientific research, and although the allegations related to work published before Dr. Tessier-Lavigne joined the university in 2016, the charges poorly reflected the integrity of the university.
In a statement outlining the reasons for his resignation, Dr Tessier-Lavigne said: “I expect there will be an ongoing discussion about the report and its findings, at least in the short term, which could lead to a debate about my ability to lead the university in the new academic year.”
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, 63, will leave the presidency at the end of August but will remain at the university as a professor of biology.
The university has named Richard Saller, professor of European studies, interim president, effective September 1.
As president of Stanford, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne is known for launching the university’s first new school in 70 years, the Doerr School of Sustainability. Opened last year, the school’s stated mission is to seek a solution to climate change.
The committee’s 89-page report, based on more than 50 interviews and a review of more than 50,000 documents, concluded that members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs engaged in improper manipulation of research data or deficient scientific practices, resulting in significant flaws in five papers of which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was lead author.
In several cases, the committee found that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had not taken sufficient steps to correct the errors, and it questioned its decision not to seek a correction in the 2009 article after follow-up studies found its main conclusion to be incorrect.
The flaws cited by the panel were for a total of 12 papers, in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was listed either as the lead or co-author. As a renowned neuroscientist, he has published over 200 papers, primarily focusing on the cause and treatment of degenerative brain diseases. Beginning in the 1990s, he worked at several institutions, including Stanford, Rockefeller University, University of California San Francisco, and Genentech, a biotechnology company.
The accusations first surfaced 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 accuracy and honesty of the work produced in the labs supervised by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne.
The newspaper first reported complaints last November that images were manipulated in published articles citing Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as the lead or co-author.
In February, the campus newspaper published an article with more serious fraud allegations involving the 2009 paper that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne published while he was a principal investigator at Genentech.
The Stanford Daily report said an investigation by Genentech found that the 2009 study contained falsified data and that Dr Tessier-Lavigne tried to keep his discoveries hidden.
He also reported that a postdoctoral researcher working on the study was caught by Genentech falsifying data.
Both Dr. Tessier-Lavigne and the former researcher, now a practicing doctor in Florida, strongly denied the allegations, which were largely based on unnamed sources.
Noting that in some cases it was unable to identify the unnamed sources cited in the Stanford Daily article, the review panel said the Daily’s assertion that “Genentech investigated and found fraud” in the study “appears to be erroneous.” No such investigation has been conducted, according to the report.
Following the journal’s initial report of the manipulated studies in November, Stanford’s board of trustees formed a special committee to look into the allegations, led by Carol Lam, a Stanford trustee and former federal prosecutor. The special committee then hired Mark Filip, a former Illinois federal judge, and his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, to lead the review.
In January, it was announced that Mr Filip had also called on the five-member scientific panel – which included a Nobel laureate and a former Princeton president – to examine the claims from a scientific perspective.
Genentech had touted the 2009 study as a breakthrough, with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne describing the results during a presentation Genentech investors as a completely new and different way to look at the process of Alzheimer’s disease.
The study focused on what she said was the previously unknown role of a brain protein – Death Receptor 6 – in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
As has been the case with many new theories about Alzheimer’s disease, a central finding of the study turned out to be incorrect. After several years of attempts to duplicate the results, Genentech finally dropped the investigative lead.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne left Genentech in 2011 to lead Rockefeller University, but, with the company, published subsequent work acknowledging failure to confirm key pieces of research.
More recently, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne told the STAT NEWS publication that there were inconsistencies in the results of the experiments, which he blamed on impure protein samples.
The failure of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s Genentech lab to ensure sample purity was one of the scientific process issues cited by the panel, which also criticized Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s decision not to edit the original paper as “suboptimal” but within the bounds of scientific practice.
In his statement, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said he had previously attempted to publish corrections to Cell and Science’s papers, but Cell refused to publish a correction and Science did not publish one after agreeing to do so.
The panel’s findings confirmed a report published in April by Genentech, which said its own internal review of the Stanford Daily claims found no evidence of “fraud, fabrication or other intentional wrongdoing”.
The bulk of the committee’s report, about 60 pages, is a detailed appendix of image analysis in 12 published scientific papers in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne authored or co-authored, some dating back 20 years.
The panel found several examples of images in the papers that had been duplicated or pasted, but concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had not participated in the manipulation, was unaware of them at the time, and had not been reckless in not detecting them.
Olivier Whang contributed report.
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