Following months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne introduced Wednesday that he would resign as president of Stanford College after an unbiased evaluate of his analysis discovered vital flaws in research he supervised going again many years.
The evaluate, performed by an outdoor panel of scientists, refuted essentially the most severe declare involving Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s work — that an vital 2009 Alzheimer’s examine was the topic of an investigation that discovered falsified knowledge and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had lined it up.
The panel concluded that the claims, printed in February by The Stanford Day by day, the campus newspaper, “seem like mistaken” and that there was no proof of falsified knowledge or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had in any other case engaged in fraud.
However the evaluate additionally said that the 2009 examine, performed whereas he was an government on the biotech firm Genentech, had “a number of issues” and “fell beneath customary requirements of scientific rigor and course of,” particularly for a paper of such potential penalties.
On account of the evaluate, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne stated he would retract a 1999 paper that appeared within the journal Cell and two others that appeared in Science in 2001. Two different papers printed in Nature, together with the 2009 Alzheimer’s examine, would additionally endure what was described as complete correction.
Stanford is thought for its management in scientific analysis, and although the claims concerned work printed earlier than Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s arrival on the college in 2016, the allegations mirrored poorly on the college’s integrity.
In a press release describing his causes for resigning, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne stated, “I anticipate there could also be ongoing dialogue concerning the report and its conclusions, at the very least within the close to time period, which may result in debate about my skill to guide the college into the brand new tutorial 12 months.”
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, 63, will relinquish the presidency on the finish of August however stay on the college as a professor of biology.
The college named Richard Saller, a professor of European research, as interim president, efficient Sept. 1.
As president of Stanford, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne is thought for beginning the college’s first new college in 70 years, the Doerr College of Sustainability. Opened final 12 months, the varsity’s said mission is to hunt an answer to local weather change.
The panel’s 89-page report, based mostly on greater than 50 interviews and a evaluate of greater than 50,000 paperwork, concluded that members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs engaged in inappropriate manipulation of analysis knowledge or poor scientific practices, leading to vital flaws in 5 papers that listed Dr. Tessier-Lavigne because the precept writer.
In a number of cases, the panel discovered, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne took inadequate steps to right errors, and it questioned his resolution to not search a correction within the 2009 paper after follow-up research revealed that its key discovering was incorrect.
The failings cited by the panel concerned a complete of 12 papers, wherein Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was listed both as precept writer or co-author. As a famous neuroscientist, he has printed greater than 200 papers, focusing totally on the trigger and therapy of degenerative mind ailments. Starting within the Nineteen Nineties, he has labored at a number of establishments, together with Stanford, Rockefeller College, the College of California, San Francisco, and Genentech, a biotechnology firm.
The accusations had first surfaced years in the past on PubPeer, an internet crowdsourcing web site for publishing and discussing scientific work. However they resurfaced after the scholar newspaper, The Stanford Day by day, printed a collection of articles questioning the accuracy and honesty of labor produced in laboratories overseen by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne.
The newspaper first reported claims final November that pictures have been manipulated in printed papers itemizing Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as both lead writer or co-author.
In February, the campus newspaper printed an article with extra severe claims of fraud involving the 2009 paper that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne printed whereas a senior scientist at Genentech.
The Stanford Day by day report stated an investigation by Genentech discovered that the 2009 examine contained falsified knowledge, and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne tried to maintain its findings hidden.
It additionally reported {that a} postdoctoral researcher who labored on the examine had been caught by Genentech falsifying knowledge.
Each Dr. Tessier-Lavigne and the previous researcher, now a medical physician training in Florida, strongly denied the claims, which relied closely on unnamed sources.
Noting that, in some instances, it was unable to determine the unnamed sources cited in The Stanford Day by day story, the evaluate panel stated that The Day by day’s declare that “Genentech had performed a fraud investigation and made a discovering of fraud” within the examine “seem like mistaken.” No such investigation had been performed, the report stated.
Following the newspaper’s preliminary report about manipulated research in November, Stanford’s board shaped a particular committee to evaluate the claims, headed by Carol Lam, a Stanford trustee and former federal prosecutor. The particular committee then engaged Mark Filip, a former federal choose in Illinois, and his regulation agency, Kirkland & Ellis, to run the evaluate.
In January, it was introduced that Mr. Filip additionally had enlisted the five-member scientific panel — which included a Nobel laureate and a former Princeton president — to look at the claims from a scientific perspective.
Genentech had touted the 2009 examine as a breakthrough, with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne characterizing the findings throughout a presentation to Genentech buyers as a totally new and totally different method of wanting on the Alzheimer’s illness course of.
The examine centered on what it stated was the beforehand unknown function of a mind protein — Dying Receptor 6 — within the improvement of Alzheimer’s.
As has been the case with many new theories in Alzheimer’s, a central discovering of the examine was discovered to be incorrect. Following a number of years of makes an attempt to duplicate the outcomes, Genentech in the end deserted the road of inquiry.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne left Genentech in 2011 to move Rockefeller College, however, together with the corporate, printed subsequent work acknowledging the failure to substantiate key components of the analysis.
Extra just lately, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne advised the publication STAT NEWS that there had been inconsistencies within the outcomes of experiments, which he blamed on impure protein samples.
The failure of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s Genentech laboratory to guarantee the samples’ purity was one of many scientific course of issues cited by the panel, which additionally criticized Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s resolution to not right the unique paper as “suboptimal” however throughout the bounds of scientific observe.
In his assertion, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne stated that he had earlier tried to problem corrections to the Cell and Science papers, however that Cell had declined to publish a correction and Science didn’t publish one after agreeing to take action.
The panel’s findings confirmed a report launched in April by Genentech, which stated its personal inside evaluate of The Stanford Day by day’s claims didn’t discover any proof of “fraud, fabrication, or different intentional wrongdoing.”
A lot of the panel’s report, about 60 pages, is an in depth appendix of research of pictures in 12 printed scientific papers wherein Dr. Tessier-Lavigne served both as writer or co-author, some courting again 20 years.
The panel discovered a number of cases of pictures within the papers that had been duplicated or spliced however concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had not participated within the manipulation, was not conscious of them on the time, and had not been reckless in failing to detect them.
Oliver Whang contributed reporting.
