The president of Stanford University, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, announced that he would resign at the end of August after an independent probe of his scientific papers that spanned months found substantial flaws in studies he supervised going back decades.
The probe panel was constituted of outside independent scientists who concluded that Mr Tessier-Lavigne’s works had “multiple problems” and “fell below customary standards of scientific rigour and process,” especially for such a potentially important paper, New York Times reported.
Although the scientist’s professionalism has been publicly questioned on Pubpeer, an online crowdsourcing network for publishing and discussing scientific work, the investigation started after a series of publications by the university’s student newspaper, Stanford Daily which cast doubt on several works produced in laboratories overseen by Mr Tessier-Lavigne.
Last November, the newspaper reported that images were manipulated in published scientific papers with Mr Tessier-Lavigne as either lead author or co-author.
The 89-page report from the Stanford panel was based on more than 50 interviews and a review of more than 50,000 documents.
It concluded that Mr Tessier-Lavigne’s employees engaged in improper data manipulation or poor scientific practices, leading to significant flaws in five papers on which he was listed as the primary author.
The panel concluded that the scientist failed to take adequate action to fix errors in a number of cases and questioned why he did not request a correction for the 2009 study after further research indicated that its main conclusion was incorrect.
Additional allegations of fraud about the 2009 study, which Mr Tessier-Lavigne produced while he was a senior scientist at Genentech (a biotechnology corporation), were made public by The Stanford Daily in February.
It claimed that a Genentech probe discovered that the study used fabricated data and that Mr Tessier-Lavigne made an effort to conceal its conclusions.It also added that Genentech had apprehended a postdoctoral researcher who had worked on the study, fabricating data.
The assertions, which largely depended on unnamed sources, were categorically rejected by Mr Tessier-Lavigne and the former researcher, now a medical professional working in Florida.
The newspaper articles’ most serious claim was that the scientist covered up malpractices which included falsification of data in a 2009 Alzheimer’s study, but the panel ruled against the assertion, concluding that it was “mistaken” on the basis of lack of proof.
Following the review, Mr Tessier-Lavigne will ask that the 2009 paper, published in Nature and another Nature study, undergo important modifications.
He also stated that he would ask for the retraction of three papers: one in 1999 published in the journal Cell; two in 2001 that appeared in Science.
