Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a renowned neuroscientist, announced Wednesday that he would be stepping down from his position as president of Stanford University after the publication of an outside review of his scientific work found an error in several high-profile journal articles published under his purview.
A committee prepared the review in response to allegations that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was involved in scientific misconduct. Five well-known biologists and neuroscientists served on the committee, including Randy Schekman, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and Shirley Tilghman, who served as president of Princeton University from 2001 to 2013.
But the committee noted that “several members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s laboratories over the years appear to have manipulated research data and/or fell short of accepted scientific practices,” pointing to multiple errors in the five papers for which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was cited. Tessier-Lavigne led or oversaw the investigation. In response, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne to withdraw three of the five articles, request two major corrections, and resign as president.
“I am pleased that the panel concluded that I have not engaged in fraud or falsification of scientific data,” said Dr. Tessier-Lavigne in a statement, adding, “While I was unaware of these issues, I want to be clear that I take responsibility for the work of my lab members.”
What were the allegations?
In 2015, numerous concerns were raised on the website PubPeer about the imaging data published in three papers – one in the journal Cell in 1999 and two in the journal Science in 2001 – of which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had served as lead author. Concerns ranged, pointing to what appeared to be digital editing and manipulation of image backgrounds, duplicating certain images, and creating composite images that obscured the purity of the scientific data.
These concerns were revisited in 2022 by several media outlets, including Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, which reported Dr. Tessier-Lavigne took a closer look. The outlets drew attention to images in more than a dozen different newspapers that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had worked. While some images seemed to have little influence on the results of the studies, others seemed to influence the findings substantively.
As a result, the Stanford board of trustees opened an investigation into Dr. Tessier-Lavigne and organized the five-member expert panel to review the allegations.
In early 2023, The Stanford Daily published further allegations that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne in 2009, while working as an executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, had published an article in the journal Nature containing falsified data. Based on unnamed sources, the student paper suggested that an investigative committee had conducted an internal investigation at Genentech into the 2009 paper and found evidence of data falsification. The Stanford Daily also suggested that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had been made aware of these issues but prevented them from being released to the public.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne strongly denied the allegations.
Was there fraud?
After meeting 50 times and collecting 50,000 documents, the five-member expert panel released its findings on Wednesday. It concluded that while there was evidence of image manipulation and evidence of methodological carelessness in each of the articles examined, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had not engaged in this herself and had not “knowingly allowed others to do this”.
He was also acquitted of the most serious charge: data falsification in his 2009 Nature paper. The committee noted that the investigation “did not lack the rigor expected for an article with such potential ramifications” and determined that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne could have been more candid about the article’s shortcomings, but concluded that the allegations of fraud were false.
In the paper, the researchers claimed to have found a chain reaction of brain proteins, including one called Death Receptor 6, that contributed to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. If the research held up, it promised to open a new avenue for better understanding and treatment of the disease.
“There was some excitement that this could have been an alternative way of thinking about the disease,” says Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt University.
From further research – some published by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne – found that the experiments highlighting the role of the DR6 chain reaction in Alzheimer’s disease did not prove what was claimed. This was partly due to unforeseen side effects of the inhibitors used in the experiments, as well as impurities in the proteins used.
The expert panel suggested that, rather than publish more papers refuting the results of the 2009 paper, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne could have issued an immediate correction or retraction. But the report found that the fraud allegations, first published in The Stanford Daily based on the testimony of largely unnamed sources (some of whom the committee was unable to identify), were an unrelated case of scientific misconduct in Dr. Tessier-Lavigne with the 2009 paper.
Dr. Schrag, who found images in the 2009 study that appeared to be duplicates and publicly flagged them in February, said the study simply wasn’t rigorous enough. “The quality of the work was not high,” said Dr. Schrag, emphasizing that he was speaking for himself and not for his university.
What is ‘image manipulation’?
Of the 12 papers the expert committee reviewed, it found “manipulation of research data” in almost all of them. According to the report, such manipulation involves a range of practices, including digitally modifying images, splitting panels, using data from unrelated experiments, duplicating data and digitally altering the appearance of proteins. But the commission admitted that some examples of manipulation may have been unintentional, or perhaps an attempt to “sweat” the results.
Mike Rossner, president of the biomedical image manipulation consulting firm, Image Data Integrity, said he spent 12 years between 2002 and 2013 screening manuscripts accepted for publication in The Journal of Cell Biology. In most cases, he said, the problems were unintentional and did not affect the interpretation of the data. But in about 1 percent of cases, the paper had to be pulled.
“A pattern is emerging that this isn’t as rare as we’d like to believe it is,” said Dr. Trestle.
Is ‘lab culture’ to blame?
The many instances of image manipulation led the expert committee to speak with postdoctoral researchers who, at various times and at various institutions, under Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, including Stanford and Genentech.
Many praised Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s intellectual acuity and dedication to scientific rigor, but many also described a laboratory culture that encouraged good results and successful experiments. They believed that the lab, and Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that is, postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that is, postdocs who were unable or difficult to generate such data),” the report noted.
The committee determined that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not wish for this dynamic, but that it may have contributed to the high levels of data manipulation that emanated from his laboratories.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, who will step down as president on Aug. 31 but will remain a professor of biology at Stanford, said in an email to students, “While I continue to scrutinize all the science in my lab, I’ve also always run my lab based on trust: trust in my students and postdocs, and trust that the data they presented to me was real and accurate. I will further tighten the controls in the future.”