Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a famend neuroscientist, introduced on Wednesday that he would step down from his place as president of Stanford College, after the discharge of an exterior evaluation of his scientific work discovered fault with a number of high-profile journal articles printed below his purview.
A committee drafted the evaluation in response to allegations that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was concerned in scientific misconduct. 5 well-known biologists and neuroscientists had been on the committee, together with Randy Schekman, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Drugs, and Shirley Tilghman, who served as president of Princeton College from 2001 to 2013. In its report, which targeted on 12 educational papers, the committee stated there was no proof that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had knowingly falsified information or withheld such info from the general public.
However the committee famous that “a number of members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over time seem to have manipulated analysis information and/or fallen in need of accepted scientific practices,” mentioning a number of errors within the 5 papers for which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had led or overseen the analysis. In response, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne vowed to retract three of the 5 articles, request main corrections for 2 and step down from his place as president.
“I’m gratified that the panel concluded I didn’t interact in any fraud or falsification of scientific information,” Dr. Tessier-Lavigne stated in a press release, including: “Though I used to be unaware of those points, I need to be clear that I take duty for the work of my lab members.”
What had been the allegations?
In 2015, quite a few considerations had been raised on the web site PubPeer concerning the picture information printed in three papers — one within the journal Cell in 1999 and two within the journal Science in 2001 — on which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had served as a lead writer. The considerations diversified, mentioning what seemed to be the digital enhancing and manipulation of picture backgrounds, the duplication of explicit pictures and the creation of composite pictures that obscured the purity of the scientific information.
These considerations had been revisited in 2022 by a number of media shops, together with Stanford’s pupil newspaper, The Stanford Each day, which forged additional scrutiny on Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s analysis. The shops drew consideration to pictures in additional than a dozen completely different papers that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had labored on. Though some pictures appeared to have had little affect on the outcomes of the research, others appeared to have substantively affected the findings.
Consequently, Stanford’s board of trustees opened an investigation into Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s scientific work and arranged the five-member skilled panel to evaluation the allegations.
In early 2023, The Stanford Each day printed additional allegations that, in 2009, when Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was working as an govt on the biotechnology firm Genentech, he had printed a paper within the journal Nature that contained falsified information. Counting on unnamed sources, the coed newspaper steered {that a} analysis evaluation committee had performed an inside investigation at Genentech into the 2009 paper and located proof of information falsification. The Stanford Each day additionally steered that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had been made conscious of those points however prevented them from being launched to the general public.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne strongly denied the allegations.
Was there fraud?
After assembly 50 occasions and accumulating 50,000 paperwork, the five-member skilled panel launched its findings on Wednesday. It concluded that, though there was picture manipulation and proof of methodological carelessness in every of the papers it examined, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had not engaged in any of this himself and had not “knowingly countenanced others doing so.”
He was additionally absolved of probably the most severe allegation: information falsification in his 2009 Nature paper. The committee famous that the analysis “lacked the rigor anticipated for a paper of such potential consequence” and decided that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne may have been extra forthright concerning the paper’s shortcomings, but it surely concluded that the allegations of fraud had been false.
Within the paper, the researchers claimed to have discovered a sequence response of mind proteins, together with one known as Dying Receptor 6, that contributed to the event of Alzheimer’s illness. If the analysis held up, it promised to current a brand new avenue for a greater understanding and therapy of the illness.
“There was some pleasure that this might have been another mind-set concerning the illness,” stated Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt College.
Nonetheless, additional analysis — some printed by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s lab — discovered that the experiments highlighting the function of the DR6 chain response in Alzheimer’s didn’t show what was claimed. This was true, partially, due to unexpected unwanted side effects of the inhibitors that had been used within the experiments, in addition to impurities within the proteins that had been used.
The skilled panel steered that, as a substitute of publishing extra articles that disproved the outcomes of the 2009 paper, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne may have issued a direct correction or retraction. However the report decided that the allegations of fraud, first printed in The Stanford Each day based mostly on the testimony of largely unnamed sources (a few of whom the committee was unable to establish), conflated an unrelated occasion of scientific misconduct in Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s laboratory with the 2009 paper.
Dr. Schrag, who discovered pictures that appeared to be duplicates within the 2009 examine and flagged them publicly in February, stated that the examine merely was not rigorous sufficient. “The standard of the work was not excessive,” stated Dr. Schrag, stressing that he was talking for himself and never his college.
What’s ‘picture manipulation’?
Of the 12 papers the skilled committee reviewed, it discovered “manipulation of analysis information” in almost all of them. In keeping with the report, such manipulation constitutes a variety of practices, together with digitally altering pictures, splicing panels, utilizing information from unrelated experiments, duplicating information and digitally altering the looks of proteins. However the committee granted that a few of the examples of manipulation may have been inadvertent, or had been maybe an try at a “beautification” of the outcomes.
Mike Rossner, president of the biomedical picture manipulation consulting firm Picture Information Integrity, stated that he spent 12 years screening manuscripts accepted for publication in The Journal of Cell Biology between 2002 and 2013. He discovered that round 25 p.c of papers “had some form of manipulation that violated our pointers and needed to be corrected earlier than publication.” In most situations, he stated, the problems had been inadvertent and didn’t have an effect on the interpretation of the information. However in about 1 p.c of instances the paper wanted to be pulled.
“There may be this sample rising of this not being as uncommon as we need to imagine that it’s,” Dr. Schrag stated.
Is ‘laboratory tradition’ in charge?
The various situations of picture manipulation prompted the skilled committee to talk with postdoctoral researchers who had labored below Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at completely different occasions and at completely different establishments, together with Stanford and Genentech.
Many praised Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s mental acuity and dedication to scientific rigor, however many additionally described a lab tradition that incentivized good outcomes and profitable experiments. They felt that the lab, and Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that’s, postdocs who may generate favorable outcomes) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that’s, postdocs who had been unable or struggled to generate such information),” the report famous.
The committee decided that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne didn’t want this dynamic, however that it might have contributed to the excessive price of information manipulation that got here out of his labs.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, who will step down as president on Aug. 31 however will stay a biology professor at Stanford, stated in an electronic mail to college students: “Whereas I regularly preserve a essential eye on all of the science in my lab, I’ve additionally all the time operated my lab on belief — belief in my college students and postdocs, and belief that the information they had been presenting to me was actual and correct. Going ahead, I will probably be additional tightening controls.”
