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Marc Tessier-Lavigne was cleared of accusations of scientific fraud and misconduct. But the review said his work had “multiple problems” and “fell below customary standards of scientific rigor.”
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Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a noted scientist, announced he would resign as president of Stanford University.Credit...Carolyn Fong for The New York Times
July 19, 2023
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Following months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he would resign as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in studies he supervised going back decades.
The review, conducted by an outside panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claim involving Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s work — that an important 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 mistaken” and that there was no evidence of falsified data or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had otherwise engaged in fraud.
But the review also stated that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had “multiple problems” and “fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process,” especially for such a potentially important paper.
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As a result of the review, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was expected to request substantial corrections in the 2009 paper, published in Nature, as well as another Nature study. He also said he would request retraction of a 1999 paper that appeared in the journal Cell and two others that appeared in Science in 2001.
What to know about why Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned.
Stanford is known for its leadership in scientific research, and even though the claims involved work published before Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s arrival at the university in 2016, the accusations reflected poorly on the university’s integrity.
In a statement describing his reasons for resigning, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said, “I expect there may be ongoing discussion about the report and its conclusions, at least in the near term, which could lead to debate about my ability to lead the university into the new academic year.”
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne will relinquish the presidency at the end of August but 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 noted neuroscientist, he has published more than 220 papers, primarily on the cause and treatment of degenerative brain diseases.
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The university named Richard Saller, a professor of European studies, as interim president, effective Sept. 1.
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’s labs engaged in inappropriate manipulation of research data or deficient scientific practices, resulting in significant flaws in five papers that listed Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as the principal author.
In several instances, the panel found, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne took insufficient steps to correct mistakes, and it questioned his decision not to seek a correction in the 2009 paper after follow-up studies revealed that its key finding was wrong.
The flaws cited by the panel involved a total of 12 papers, including seven in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was listed as co-author.
The accusations against Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, 63, had first surfaced years ago on PubPeer, an online crowdsourcing site for publishing and discussing scientific work.
