Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford University, resigned from his post on Wednesday following an independent investigation exposing serious research shortcomings amid allegations that he falsified data throughout his career, including a landmark 2009 report on Alzheimer’s.
“At various times when concerns with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers emerged — in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-2016, and March 2021 — Dr. Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record,” the investigators noted.
The malpractice “spanned labs at three separate institutions,” the report continued, ” where Tessier-Lavigne contributed to a culture that “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 struggled to generate such data).”
Tessier-Lavigne confirmed that he plans to retract five studies on which he was listed as a primary author that the investigation found suffered from “manipulation of research data.”
“I am gratified that the Panel concluded I did not engage in any fraud or falsification of scientific data. Specifically, the Panel did not find that I engaged in research misconduct regarding the twelve papers reviewed, nor did it find I had knowledge of or was reckless regarding research misconduct in my lab,” Tessier-Lavigne said in a public statement addressing the news.
“As I have emphatically stated, I have never submitted a scientific paper without firmly believing that the data were correct and accurately presented. Today’s report supports that statement.”
“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 as President effective August 31,” the academic announced.
Charges that Tessier-Lavigne’s research was plagued by substandard methods were first broken by the campus paper, the Stanford Daily, in a February expose. The report found that one of his highly-cited articles in Nature, a prestigious academic journal, claiming to have identified a breakthrough in cognitive degeneration for Alzheimer patients, lacked robustness.
“But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review,” the Daily noted, which “discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.”
Although the university’s independent investigation cleared the academic of the student outlet’s core contention — calling them “mistaken.” Based on over 50 interviews, the nearly hundred-page report was a devastating indictment that found “repeated instances of manipulation of research data and/or subpar scientific practices from different people and in labs run by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at different institutions.”
Tessier-Lavigne acknowledged as much in his response, saying the investigation found “some areas where I should have done better, and I accept the report’s conclusions.”
Richard Saller, a professor of European studies, will succeed Tessier-Lavigne on September 1.