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Marc Tessier-Lavigne, renowned neuroscientist, announced Wednesday that he would resign as president of Stanford University, after the publication of an external review of his scientific work which allegedly criticized several high-level journal articles published under his responsibility.
A committee wrote the review in response to allegations that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was involved in scientific misconduct. Five well-known biologists and neuroscientists were on the committee, including Randy Schekman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013, and Shirley Tilghman, who served as president of Princeton University from 2001 to 2013. In her report , which covered 12 academic papers, the committee said there was no evidence that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne knowingly falsified data or withheld such information from the public.
But the committee noted that “several members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over the years appear to have manipulated research data and/or fell short of accepted scientific practice,” pointing to multiple errors in the five papers for which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had directed or supervised the research. In response, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne promised to withdraw three of the five articles, seek major corrections for two, and step down as chair.
“I am pleased that the panel has concluded that I did not commit any fraud or falsification of scientific data,” Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement, adding: “Although I was unaware of these issues , I want to make it clear that I take responsibility for the work of the members of my laboratory.
What were the allegations?
In 2015, numerous concerns were raised on the PubPeer website about image data published in three articles – one in the journal Cell in 1999 and two in the journal Science in 2001 – which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had been the author of. main author. Concerns varied, highlighting what appeared to be the digital editing and manipulation of image backgrounds, the duplication of particular images, and the creation of composite images that obscured the purity of scientific data.
These concerns were revisited in 2022 by several media outlets, including Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, which took a closer look at Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s research. Outlets drew attention to images in more than a dozen different articles that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had worked on. Although some images appeared to have little impact on study results, others appeared to have substantially affected the results.
As a result, Stanford’s board of trustees opened an investigation into Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s scientific work and organized the five-member panel to examine the allegations.
Early 2023, The Stanford Daily published other allegations that in 2009, when Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was working as an executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, he published an article in the journal Nature that contained falsified data. Based on unnamed sources, the student newspaper suggested that a research review board conducted an internal Genentech investigation into the 2009 paper and found evidence of data tampering. The Stanford Daily also suggested that Dr Tessier-Lavigne was made aware of the issues but prevented them from being made public.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne strongly denied the allegations.
Was there fraud?
After meeting 50 times and collecting 50,000 documents, the five-member expert group released its findings on Wednesday. He concluded that while there was image manipulation and evidence of methodological neglect in each of the papers he reviewed, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not engage in any of this himself. itself and had not “knowingly authorized others to do so”.
He was also absolved of the most serious allegation: data falsification in his 2009 Nature paper. The committee noted that the research “lacks the rigor expected for a paper of such potential consequence” and determined that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne could have been more candid about the shortcomings of the article, but he concluded that the allegations of fraud were false.
In the article, the researchers claimed to have discovered a chain reaction of brain proteins, including one called Death Receptor 6, which contributed to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. If the research held firm, it promised to present a new avenue for better understanding and treatment of the disease.
“There was some excitement that it might have been a different way of thinking about the disease,” said Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt University.
However, other research – some published by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s lab – found that experiments highlighting the role of the DR6 chain reaction in Alzheimer’s disease did not prove what was claimed. This was true, in part, because of the unintended side effects of the inhibitors that were used in the experiments, as well as impurities in the proteins that were used.
The expert panel suggested that instead of publishing more papers that refute the findings of the 2009 paper, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne could have published a direct correction or retraction. But the report determined that the fraud allegations, first published in The Stanford Daily based on testimony from largely anonymous sources (some of whom the committee was unable to identify), confounded a case. unrelated scientific misconduct in Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s laboratory. with the 2009 newspaper.
Dr Schrag, who found images that appeared to be duplicates in the 2009 study and reported them publicly in February, said the study was simply not rigorous enough. “The quality of the work was not high,” Dr. Schrag said, emphasizing that he was speaking for himself and not for his university.
What is “image manipulation”?
Of the 12 papers the panel reviewed, it found “manipulation of research data” in almost all. According to the report, such manipulation constitutes a range of practices, including digitally altering images, splicing panels, using data from unrelated experiments, duplicating data, and digitally altering the image. appearance of proteins. But the committee conceded that some of the instances of manipulation could have been unintentional, or were perhaps an attempt to “beautify” the results.
Mike Rossner, president of biomedical image manipulation consultancy Image Data Integrity, said he spent 12 years reviewing manuscripts accepted for publication in The Journal of Cell Biology between 2002 and 2013. He found that ‘about 25% of articles “had some kind of manipulation that violated our guidelines and needed to be corrected before publication. In most cases, he said, the problems were unintentional and did not affect the interpretation of the data. But in about 1% of cases, the paper had to be pulled.
“There’s this pattern emerging, it’s not as rare as we want to believe,” Dr. Schrag said.
Is “laboratory culture” to blame?
The many cases of image manipulation prompted the panel to speak with postdoctoral researchers who had worked under Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at different times and at different institutions, including Stanford and Genentech.
Many praised Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s intellectual acumen and commitment to scientific rigor, but many also described a laboratory culture that encouraged good results and successful experiments. They felt that the lab and Dr. Tessier-Lavigne “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (i.e. postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (i.e. i.e. postdocs unable or struggling to generate such data),” the report notes.
The committee determined that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not want this dynamic, but that it may have contributed to the high rate of data manipulation coming out of his labs.
Dr Tessier-Lavigne, who will step down as president on August 31 but will remain a professor of biology at Stanford, said in an email to students: “While I continually maintain a critical eye on all of the science in my lab, I have also always operated my lab on trust – trust in my students and postdocs, and trust that the data they presented to me was real and accurate. Going forward, I will tighten controls even further.
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