Stanford president will resign after report finds flaws in his investigation
After months of intensive research of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he would step down as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in studies he led decades back.
The judgementconducted by an outside panel of scientists, disproved the most serious claim regarding Dr. Tessier-Lavigne – that a major 2009 Alzheimer’s study was the subject of an investigation that found falsified data and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had covered it up.
The panel concluded that the claims “appear to be true” and that there was no evidence of falsified data or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was otherwise guilty of fraud.
But the review also stated that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had “multiple issues” and “fell below usual standards of scientific rigor and process,” especially for such a potentially important paper.
As a result of the assessment, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne expects to request substantial corrections to the 2009 paper published in Nature, as well as another Nature study. He also said he would request the 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 while the claims related to work published before Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s arrival at the university in 2016, the allegations reflected badly on the university’s integrity.
In a statement describing his reasons for stepping down, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne: “I expect there will be ongoing discussion about the report and its conclusions, at least in the near term, which could lead to discussion about my ability to lead the university into the new academic year.”
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne will step down from the chair 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 has published more than 220 papers, mainly on the cause and treatment of degenerative brain diseases.
Effective September 1, the university has appointed Richard Saller, professor of European studies, as interim president.
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. Tessier-Lavigne engaged in improper research data manipulation or flawed scientific practice, resulting in significant flaws in five papers in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was listed as the lead author.
In several instances, the panel found that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not take sufficient steps to correct errors, and it questioned its decision not to seek correction in the 2009 paper after follow-up research found the key finding incorrect.
The shortcomings cited by the panel involved a total of 12 papers, including seven in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was listed as a co-author.
The allegations against Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, 63, 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 work being produced in laboratories overseen by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne. The Stanford Daily reported that in November claims that images were manipulated in published articles in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was listed as lead author or co-author.
In February, The Stanford Daily published more serious claims of fraud related to the 2009 paper Dr. Tessier-Lavigne published when he was a senior scientist at Genentech. It said an investigation by Genentech found that the study contained falsified data and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne tried to hide his findings.
It also said a postdoctoral researcher who had worked on the study had been caught falsifying data by Genentech. Both dr. Tessier-Lavigne and the former investigator, now a physician practicing in Florida, strongly denied the claims, relying heavily on unnamed sources.
The review panel said The Stanford Daily’s claim that “Genentech had conducted a fraud investigation and found fraud” in the investigation “appears to be correct”. No such investigation had been conducted, the report said, but it noted that the panel was unable to identify some 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 paper is sticking to its reporting.
In response to the newspaper’s first report on rigged studies in November, Stanford’s board of directors formed a special committee to review the claims, headed by Carol Lam, a Stanford trustee and former federal prosecutor. The special commission then hired Mark Filip, a former Illinois federal judge, and his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, to conduct the review.
In January, it was announced that Mr. Filip had brought in the five-member scientific panel — including a Nobel laureate and a former president of Princeton — to examine the claims from a scientific perspective.
Genentech had touted the 2009 study as a breakthrough, with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne characterized the findings during a presentation for Genentech investors as an entirely new and different way of looking at the Alzheimer’s disease process.
The study focused on what it 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 wrong. After years of trying to duplicate the results, Genentech finally abandoned the line of research.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne left Genentech in 2011 to head Rockefeller University, but later published work with the company acknowledging that key parts of the research had gone unconfirmed.
More recently, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne told industry publication Stat News that there had been inconsistencies in the results of experiments, which he blamed samples of impure proteins.
His lab’s failure to ensure the purity of the samples was one of the scientific process problems cited by the panel, even though it found that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was unaware of those problems at the time. It called Dr. Tessier-Lavigne to correct the original paper not “sub-optimally”, but within the limits of scientific practice.
In his statement, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne that he had previously tried to issue corrections to the Cell and Science papers, but that Cell had refused to publish a correction and that Science failed to publish one after agreeing to it.
The panel’s findings were consistent with a report released by Genentech in April said its own internal review of The Stanford Daily’s claims found no evidence of “fraud, fabrication or other willful misconduct”.
The bulk of the Stanford panel’s report is a detailed appendix that analyzes images in 12 published papers in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne served as author or co-author, some of which are 20 years old.
In the papers, the panel found multiple instances of images that were duplicated or split, but concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had not participated in the manipulation, was unaware of it at the time, and had not been reckless in not detecting them.
Dr. Matthew Schrag, an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University who in February identified problems with the 2009 Alzheimer’s study, said the study’s publication illustrated how scientific journals sometimes give prominent researchers the benefit of the doubt when vetting their studies.
For senior scientists who run busy laboratories, Dr. Schrag, it can be difficult to examine every piece of data produced by more junior researchers they supervise. But, he said, “I think the accumulation of problems is reaching a level where some oversight is needed.”
Dr. Schrag, stressing that he was speaking for himself and not Vanderbilt, said Dr. Tessier-Lavigne made sense, as did his staying on the faculty. He noted that much of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s discoveries had been validated and had helped untangle critical mysteries of neuroscience.
“I have some mixed feelings about the heat he’s taking because I think it’s extremely unlikely that he was the protagonist here,” said Dr. Trestle. “I think he had a responsibility to act more likely than he did, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t trying to do the right thing.”
Oliver Wang, Benjamin Muller And Kate Robertson reporting contributed.