Stanford University PrIncident Marc Tessier-Lavigne Last Wednesday, he announced he would step down next month amid an investigation into his research as a neuroscientist.
In the statement, Tessier-Lavigne He has been cleared of “any fraud or falsification of scientific data” but added that “in the interest of the university, I have decided to resign as president effective August 31.”
The question of the Board of Trustees ceased to sue Tesser-Lavigne – who remained President of Stanford since 2016 – Fraud, claiming that there is no evidence that he was “involved in personal research misconduct”.
However, it was He concluded that five papers It included the work of “certain members of the laboratories under the supervision of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne” who “improperly falsified research data or engaged in flawed scientific practices that resulted in significant flaws in those papers” when Tessier-Lavigne was the lead author.
“Tesser-Lavigne did not take adequate steps to correct errors in the scientific record” when the issues arose, according to the board’s report.
Tessier-Lavigne was a neuroscientist who led several extensive and successful research laboratories in San Francisco, California, at Genentech and Stanford.
Some of his most important work has focused on the mechanisms that may be responsible for brain degeneration and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Concerns are over. Work by Tessier-Lavigne and his collaborators was posted online on the PUBPEER charity website as early as 2015..
The website allows scientists to share comments or critiques after studies are published. PUBPEER allows anonymous comments.
In November, the university’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, The European Organization for Molecular Biology released news that it is reviewing a paper Tessier-Lavigne’s involvement in scientific misconduct.
Elisabeth Bick, a scientist who investigates plagiarism and research misconduct, identified more papers that she suspected of plagiarism.
“I’m surprised he’s stepping down, and I think it’s a good result,” Bick said Wednesday shortly after news of Tesser-Lavigne’s resignation broke.
“He should have been in better control. As the senior author in scientific papers, you are not the one standing in the laboratory, but ultimately you are responsible for the integrity of the work,” she said.
Bick said it can be difficult to detect errors and manipulation of data, but issues with images used in research can be the “tip of the iceberg” of incredible work.
“The things that are indicated, the image problems, are visible problems. If you see visible problems in the photos, this may be a sign that there are other problems that you can’t handle,” said Bick.
“Any data in the form of a table or a line graph or some numbers is very difficult to know whether it is true or not,” she said. “At least in the photos, we know that that’s real data, maybe, it’s the tip of the iceberg, which is a sign that the rest of the data is unreliable.”
A report by Stanford Daily and questions raised by Bick ultimately affected Stanford’s request.
Tessier Lavigne said in a statement on Stanford’s website that he would retract three papers he was lead author on and make corrections to two others. He will remain on the Stanford faculty, the statement said.
In an open letter to the Stanford community, Tessier Lavigne suggested that he was victimized by placing too much “faith” in the work of students and postdoctoral researchers.
He writes that it “enforces additional controls, including, for example, more systematically matching the processed images to the original raw data.”
Bick said that any future work by Tesser-Lavigne could be greeted with skepticism, given the concerns raised in previous studies.
“It’s different periods of work. So it doesn’t look like one guy in the same lab is just a gangster. It looks like he was at different times in his life, at UCSF, at Genentech.” “If he writes new papers, they are – and should be – held to a high standard and very well reviewed.”
Professor Richard Saller He will become interim president of the prestigious University of Northern California on Sept. 1, the board of trustees said.
This article was originally published by NBCNews.com