In an abrupt turn, Stanford president and renowned neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he will step down as the university’s leader. His resignation came after he learned the results of an extensive investigation into his past research, which confirmed data-manipulation in scientific papers that he co-authored and found that he took insufficient steps to correct them.
The nearly 100-page investigative report was released by a special committee of Stanford’s Board of Trustees. The report, authored by a former federal judge and an outside panel of scientists that reviewed a dozen papers Tessier-Lavigne co-authored before becoming Stanford’s president, concluded that he did not personally engage in scientific misconduct.
The panel found numerous issues, however, with five studies in which Tessier-Lavigne was a major contributor, including evidence of data manipulation in scientific images. While the report concluded that it would not have been reasonable to expect Tessier-Lavigne to catch these errors prior to publication, he failed to promptly correct or retract studies once problems were later flagged. In light of his discussions with the panel, Tessier-Lavigne’s statement and the report indicate that he is now planning to retract three studies and to correct two others.
“The Scientific Panel has concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not personally engage in research misconduct for any of the twelve papers about which allegations have been raised,” the report notes. “However, several of these papers do exhibit manipulation of research data.”
At multiple points throughout his career, the panel added, Tessier-Lavigne “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.”
Tessier-Lavigne framed the report’s findings as largely exonerating him in a statement issued on Wednesday, but he accepted the panel’s assessment. “I agree that in some instances I should have been more diligent when seeking corrections, and I regret that I was not,” he said. “The Panel’s review also identified instances of manipulation of research data by others in my lab. Although I was unaware of these issues, I want to be clear that I take responsibility for the work of my lab members.”
He said he was resigning in the best interests of Stanford, which he has led since 2016 following a stint as head of The Rockefeller University.
“Although the report clearly refutes the allegations of fraud and misconduct that were made against me, for the good of the University, I have made the decision to step down,” he said, adding that he expects the findings “could lead to debate about my ability to lead the university into the new academic year. Stanford is greater than any one of us. It needs a president whose leadership is not hampered by such discussions.”
Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation takes effect Aug. 31, though he will remain a Stanford faculty member and continue to conduct research. The Board of Trustees has tapped Richard Saller, a professor of European studies at the university and a former provost of the University of Chicago, to become interim president beginning Sept. 1. Board chair Jerry Yang issued a statement saying the board accepted Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation and that it “agrees with him that it is in the University’s best interests.”
The resignation of a university president over concerns about their work as a scientist is largely unprecedented for a major research institution like Stanford. The news echoes the departure of Nobel laureate David Baltimore as president of The Rockefeller University in 1991, after a colleague with whom he co-authored a paper was accused of scientific fraud, though Baltimore himself was not accused of research misconduct.
STAT’s reporting over the past several months, including email exchanges with Tessier-Lavigne and interviews with past lab members, colleagues, and other scientists, has shed light on how this case raises thorny questions around the conduct of elite science and how much responsibility advisers should bear for work done by those in their labs. Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation may reflect a broader recognition that big-name scientists, seldom shy about accepting accolades for work done largely by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, should be held accountable for problems with the research they supervise.
STAT was provided a copy of the report and Tessier-Lavigne’s letter of resignation under embargo, under the condition that it not seek comment from the university community or others in advance of their release. Now that the news is public, this story will be updated.
Tessier-Lavigne has contributed to more than 220 scientific papers across a decades-long career marked by fresh insights into brain development. Concerns with his past research first surfaced in November, when the Stanford Daily, the university’s student newspaper, reported that image analysis experts and users of PubPeer, a website that allows people to comment on published studies, noticed something odd. Figures in some papers co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne seemed to contain images that had been duplicated, moved around, or otherwise manipulated.
Subsequent reporting by the Daily, which flagged a growing list of studies, deepened those concerns. And in February, the newspaper reported that there were falsified results in a landmark paper published in the journal Nature in 2009 while Tessier-Lavigne was a top scientist at South San Francisco biotech Genentech. The article said former company employees, most of them anonymous, claimed that Tessier-Lavigne knew about issues with the study, which was conducted under his supervision, and that he tried to keep them from the public’s attention.
These allegations triggered Stanford’s Board of Trustees to announce that it was forming a special committee to investigate concerns with Tessier-Lavigne’s past research. The committee retained former federal judge Mark Filip and his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, to lead the review with the assistance of an outside panel of five scientists, including the former president of Princeton University, a Nobel laureate, and several members of the National Academies, a body of esteemed scientists.
The special committee’s report is based on more than 50,000 documents from “journals, institutions, and Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s own digital records,” as well as more than 50 meetings with “individuals with knowledge pertaining to one or more aspects of the investigation,” according to the document. In an interview before the report’s release, Filip declined to answer specific questions about who was interviewed and who wasn’t, though the report mentions that Tessier-Lavigne was interviewed seven times by the panel and was cooperative.
The findings center around a dozen papers Tessier-Lavigne co-authored between 1999 and 2009. In seven of the 12 studies, Tessier-Lavigne was a so-called middle author, meaning he did not perform key experiments nor supervise the bulk of the science. In these cases, the panel concluded that he played little to no role in the preparation of flagged figures. In some cases, the panel wrote, he provided collaborators with mice or other materials used in experiments, and he had no knowledge of any data manipulation and couldn’t reasonably be expected to have spotted issues in the figures.
For the five studies in which he played a key and leading role, the panel similarly found that Tessier-Lavigne did not have knowledge of any data manipulation done by researchers under his supervision. The report authors did not believe he was reckless in failing to spot issues before publication, noting that some of the data manipulations went unseen for decades despite the advent of modern image analysis tools. But they added an important caveat.
“Nonetheless, based on the available research record and other factors, each of these papers has serious flaws in the presentation of research data; in at least four of the five papers, there was apparent manipulation of research data by others,” the panel wrote.
These studies included two papers published in the journal Science in 2001 as well as a study published in the journal Cell in 1999. In some cases, the panel concluded that images from a western blot, a common experiment used to detect specific proteins, had been reused, moved around, or otherwise manipulated in ways that went beyond simply trying to make a figure tidy and presentable.
The report notes that Tessier-Lavigne now plans to retract these papers, and that the panel supports this decision. The outside experts similarly found evidence of data manipulation in a 2004 Nature paper that Tessier-Lavigne supervised and which he now plans to correct.
The report also probed the science surrounding the 2009 Nature paper published during Tessier-Lavigne’s time at Genentech. This study, which raised hopes for a new way to understand and potentially treat Alzheimer’s disease, proposed a model in which two proteins, death receptor 6 and amyloid precursor protein (DR6 and APP), interact in a way that leads to neurodegeneration, a key feature of the devastating disease.
The special committee report found no evidence of fraud connected to the study, echoing findings from an internal Genentech investigation released in April. And the panel speculated, as Genentech did in its own report, that researchers’ struggles to reproduce some findings from the 2009 study, coupled with a separate, confirmed misconduct case within the company, caused observers to conflate the two cases.
The report does not clearly spell out what level of evidence it would have taken to find Tessier-Lavigne engaged in misconduct. But Filip told STAT that the panel attempted to determine whether it was more likely than not that Tessier-Lavigne had committed research misconduct, using the federal Office of Research Integrity’s definition of the term as “fabrication, falsification or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results” that is “committed intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly.”
And yet the panel didn’t completely exonerate Tessier-Lavigne. The report noted that the research that went into the 2009 Nature study “lacked the rigor expected for a paper of such potential consequence,” citing issues with the experimental design, statistical analysis, and the purity and quality of protein samples used by researchers.
The panel also found fault with Tessier-Lavigne’s response to concerns other scientists raised about several of the papers. “If Principal Investigators fail to demonstrate an appropriate appetite for correcting instances of error, mistake, or misconduct, then the often-claimed self-correcting nature of the scientific process will not occur,” the panelists wrote.
The report pointed out that a colleague of Tessier-Lavigne flagged issues with one of the 2001 Science papers weeks after publication. But while the neuroscientist initially reached out to a postdoctoral researcher asking for a correct version of the image in question, Tessier-Lavigne told the investigators he forgot to contact the journal to ask it to issue a correction.
And while Tessier-Lavigne later reached out to Science in 2015 after PubPeer users flagged issues with both 2001 papers published in that journal, the panel noted that he did not adequately follow up to ask why Science never ran the corrections he had submitted.
STAT obtained eight emails between Tessier-Lavigne and Science editors, and these messages document attempts he made in 2016 to flag issues with the paper and offer potential corrections. In one of them, he wrote that he “wanted to follow up on my last message to see if there is any more information I can provide that could assist.”
Tessier-Lavigne almost followed up again in 2021, drafting an email to Science after PubPeer users again flagged issues with one of the papers, the panel reported, but he never actually messaged the journal. Science’s editor has publicly acknowledged that the journal erred in not publishing the corrections Tessier-Lavigne provided.
The investigative report also grapples with Tessier-Lavigne’s decision not to retract or correct the 2009 Nature paper. Subsequent studies, some of which were co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne, debunked aspects of the original paper. For instance, researchers later concluded that a fragment of APP dubbed N-APP doesn’t bind efficiently to DR6, and they also learned that APP does not have to be cut before latching onto DR6. The original model also proposed that an enzyme known as caspase 3 regulated the death of neurons but not of the connections between them, which turned out not to be true.
Tessier-Lavigne and several other researchers have pointed out that making new discoveries and overturning old assumptions is a normal and healthy part of scientific progress. But while the outside panel found his efforts to correct the record through additional papers to be within standard practice, they called the decision not to correct or retract the original paper “suboptimal.”
In his own statement, Tessier-Lavigne implied that he now plans to correct the 2009 Nature paper.
The panel also investigated the culture of Tessier-Lavigne’s labs during his time at the University of California, San Francisco, Genentech, Rockefeller, and Stanford. They noted that many of his former postdocs praised the dedication to scientific excellence and rigor, but that others raised concerns that the lab tended to reward those who could generate splashy results. The panel didn’t find evidence that Tessier-Lavigne deliberately created such an environment, but noted that the pressure to publish, which is pervasive in science, can push researchers to manipulate data.
Tessier-Lavigne was provided a copy of the special committee’s report a few days ago as a courtesy, Filip told STAT, since he was the central focus of the investigation, but the panel did not solicit Tessier-Lavigne’s feedback on its contents.