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Stanford president resigns due to academic misconduct controversy
As the main author of 5 related papers, 3 retracted and 2 revised , all come from the three major journals in the biological field Science, Nature and Cell.
Moreover, many articles were published 20 years ago and have been cited hundreds of times, which are important research in the industry.
Half a year ago, an investigation into academic misconduct initiated by a Stanford sophomore and a special working group established by the Stanford school finally came to the final result:
Marc Tessier Lavigne (Marc Tessier Lavigne) has committed academic misconduct in co-authoring several papers , but there is no evidence that he himself participated in falsification and tampering with data , mainly due to "improper operations by his subordinates".
Lavigne ceased to serve as Stanford president on August 31 and continued to teach thereafter.
As soon as the news came out, it immediately aroused heated discussions from all walks of life.
The editor of Science commented:
This example is a good illustration of why being the head of a laboratory cannot be a part-time job.
Alleged papers include key Alzheimer's research
Lavigne, who joined Stanford as president in 2016 from The Rockefeller University in New York, has been a leader in brain and spinal cord research as a neuroscientist .
His research mainly focuses on the etiology and treatment of degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's, as well as the treatment of spinal cord injury. He has published many important research articles in the field of Alzheimer's disease in top journals such as Nature and Science.
Before Rockefeller University, he also served as the chief scientific officer of Genentech (Genentech), responsible for cancer, immune disease, neurodegenerative disease research and drug development.
According to the results of the report of the investigation working group, there are mainly 5 papers suspected of fraud, two Science papers in 2001, one Nature paper in 2003, one EMBO Journal (European Molecular Biology Society Journal) paper in 2008, and one Cell paper in 1999.
These 5 papers have been confirmed to have problems, 3 of which will be withdrawn, and 2 will undergo extensive corrections .
Neither a retraction nor a major revision is trivial in terms of severity. According to statistics, for every 10,000 papers, only 4 papers are usually retracted, and it is also a major revision that is sent back for correction.
Briefly review the 5 papers in question.
Published in 2008, the paper "On Receptors in the Brain" published on EMBO has reached 4,000 downloads. It can be seen that the upper and lower experimental pictures are exactly the same, almost "direct copy and paste".
This paper published on Science in 2003 has been cited more than 600 times. The research topic of this paper is of great significance for understanding the process of blood vessel development and angiogenesis.
The controversial point is also obvious. The pictures in the paper that should represent different experimental results seem to be the rotation of the same picture and are reused.
The results of this paper published in Science in 2001 provide important clues for understanding the molecular mechanism of neuronal axon growth and guidance. At present, it has been downloaded more than 2000 times and has been cited nearly 200 times.
The controversy in this paper is consistent with the above, and the imprints in Figures B and D seem to be obtained by copying.
Another paper, also published in Science in 2001, had a huge impact on the fields of neurodevelopment and axon guidance. At present,
it has been downloaded more than 2700 times and has been cited nearly 455 times.
If you look closely, you can find that in the 28th stage of the experiment, the legends for 0 hours and 1 hours are exactly the same, but the size has changed.
There is also this paper, published on Cell in 1999, about the molecular regulation mechanism of neuron axon branch formation.
In addition to the above five papers, the most controversial and influential paper is the one co-authored by Lavigne, a senior executive of a biotechnology company at the time, and published in Nature in 2009, claiming to have found the cause of brain degeneration in patients with Alzheimer's disease .
The publication of this paper caused a sensation, and even Nature published an article entitled "Alzheimer's disease theory caused a sensation" for this purpose.
After the paper was published, Lavigne was also successfully promoted to the chief scientific officer of Genentech, responsible for leading a team of more than 1,400 scientists.
But then, the company's scientists suddenly discovered that the experimental results could not be replicated.
So in 2011, an internal review by the Genentech Research Review Board found that some of the data in the paper had been falsified, but given the fact that it had happened over the years and without direct evidence:
Represents the absence of any fraud or wrongdoing.
Due to the fraud controversy, this paper has been marked with a warning label by Science, reminding readers to be careful when citing it.
So how did a scientific research leader and the principal of a prestigious school be found to be "academic misconduct"? Things have to start with a Stanford sophomore.
Stanford sophomore kicks off whole investigation
The key investigation on Lavigne started at the end of November last year.
Prior to this, several papers under Lavigne's name had been controversial about academic misconduct, but most of them were discussed in the public.
It was not until an important piece of information published in the Stanford University student newspaper "Stanford Daily" that Stanford officially opened a case for investigation.
On November 29 last year, Theo Baker, a sophomore at Stanford, broke the news that a study by President Lavigne was being investigated by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), and at the same time was being targeted by the famous academic anti-counterfeiting person Elizabeth Bicker. Three other papers published in Nature and Science were also considered to have "major problems" .
You know, Elizabeth Bicker is similar to Sherlock Holmes in the academic counterfeiting circle, and is very good at detecting specially processed images in papers.
In this revelation, a number of suspected fraudulent research charts are attached, and the suspicious parts are clearly circled.
At the same time, the article also stated that Stanford " downplayed " Lavigne's alleged academic misconduct in a statement at the time .
Spokesman Di Mostofi said Lavigne "was not involved in any way in the falsification of the two controversial papers," including the EMBO paper under review. The school said the issues did not affect the data, results or interpretation of the paper.
And this kind of rhetoric is obviously not acceptable to the censors. Theo interviewed Elizabeth Bicker, a professional academic counterfeiter. She said that it is obviously inappropriate to dismiss this on the grounds that it does not affect the data. People who read the paper may feel that there are still many errors hidden in the data?
With all kinds of doubts and arguments, this article published in the school magazine quickly attracted the attention of all parties and became the most critical fuse in the entire investigation.
On the second day after the article was published (November 30), Science announced the errata correction of two controversial papers; on December 2, Stanford officially established an investigation team and began to investigate related papers; on December 6, Cell also announced the investigation of related papers.
On December 7, the school announced the list of members of the investigation team, headed by the former U.S. Deputy Attorney General, followed by Nobel laureate Randy Sheckman and former Princeton University President Shelley Dillman, who participated in the actual investigation.
Lavigne himself issued a public statement at the time saying:
Scientific integrity is of paramount importance to the institution and to me personally.
Over the next eight months, the investigative team conducted a focused review of 12 papers Lavigne co-authored.
The results showed that 4 of the 5 papers in which Lavigne was the main author had falsified data and misleading conclusions.
Lavigne himself also issued the latest statement, saying that he is a "victim" of too much trust in his students and researchers . In the future, he will supervise the experimental work more strictly, such as systematically comparing images with original data.
On August 31, Lavigne will officially step down as president of Stanford University, but will continue to teach thereafter.
In this regard, academic anti-counterfeiting person Elizabeth Beek expressed surprise:
The thing about him resigning surprised me, and I think it's a good result.
He should be a better supervisor. As a senior scholar in the research, although he is not the person who does the experiment, he is responsible for the final work.
However, Bick also said that this turmoil will definitely have a huge impact on Lavigne's future research work, and any work may be questioned.
These academic misconduct papers appeared at different stages of his research career, so it is not a problem of a certain laboratory.
If he writes new papers afterward, they should be subject to stricter, more thorough scrutiny.
It is worth mentioning that in this "paper involved", there is another research related to Alzheimer's disease.
You must know that another "big case" by the academic anti-counterfeiting person Bick in July last year was also related to Alzheimer's disease. Science revealed that the pioneering work of the important hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease published in Nature in 2006 was suspected of data falsification.
This could have misled the field for up to 17 years.
Some netizens lamented that the research field of Alzheimer's disease has been a mess for many years, which has resulted in very few truly effective clinical studies.
In addition to the hot discussion about the investigation itself, netizens also noticed the sophomore guy who ignited the fuse this time, Theo Baker.
It is understood that he will enroll in 2022 and is very interested in news reports, computers and other fields.
Some people said that his parents were both journalists, and they were senior reporters for The New York Times and The New Yorker.
One More Thing
No matter how you say it, the wave of investigations into which President Lavigne has been involved has stunned everyone in the academic circle.
Professor Chen Yiran from Duke University also came to eat melons, and revealed the next "strong competitor"...
Perhaps this is the highest level of a pit mentor? (doge)
参考链接：
[1]https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resigns-over-manipulated-research-will-retract-at-least-3-papers/
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36790301/
[3]https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/message-stanford-community/
[4]https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-research-under-investigation-for-scientific-misconduct-university-admits-mistakes/
[5]https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/tessier-lavigne-matter-shows-why-running-lab-full-time-job