Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers
stanforddaily.com
stanforddaily.com
Stanford president’s research under investigation for scientific misconduct, University admits ‘mistakes’
https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-res...
Stanford president dodges research misconduct questions
https://stanforddaily.com/2023/04/25/stanford-president-dodg...
Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege
https://stanforddaily.com/2023/02/17/internal-review-found-f...
The reporter, Theo Baker, is a freshman.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne said all along that the bad/faked data was the work of other sloppy/bad actors. It was only through the reporting from Theo Baker and his colleagues that the public learned of MTL's negligence and culpability.
I strongly suspect that a driving factor is guys like this - leaders who reward "positive" results and punish "negative" ones.
It’s an interesting story for sure.
It brings me to wonder how much choice people really have in choosing their paths…if both your parents are journalists or [insert whatever profession], it’s as if you’re likely to pick it up no matter how hard you try not to…
It's like one side of the "legacy elite" came around and smacked down a whole different side of the "legacy elite."
wow, his parents maybe can learn from this! How to doggedly pursue allegations against the occupant of the Whitehouse, without fear or favor, with a healty dose of Grabthar's Hammer (never give up, never surrender)
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ellievhall/theo-baker-s...
The Daily can be considered a real newspaper.
There was at least one year's Tour de France in which all but one participant were later found to have been doping. In other words, you didn't get to that level of that competitive activity, if you didn't cheat, because it wasn't possible to outperform people with such a significant advantage. It actually became a contest, not just of bicycling, but of doping, because getting away with it was quite difficult and it took years for the world of cycling to get good enough countermeasures to shift the advantage to non-doping.
Academic research has, for decades now, been a very competitive, high stakes endeavor. Many fields have more people trying to work in it, than there are spots (i.e. grants and endowed chairs) available. If you have twice as many aspirants as slots available, and "only" 25% of them cheat (in this case, fudge their data to get more interesting results), then you get something like 50% of your field filled with fraud.
Moreover, the closer they are to the top, the higher the likelihood that they are "doping".
I live in Austin, TX, and I remember when nearly all of Lance Armstrong's competitors had been busted, but he had not yet. I said to other people, "well, that's it then, he must have been doping. You can't win the Tour de France 7 years in a row against doping opponents, if you're clean. Either doping doesn't work, or he was doping."
I recall several people disagreeing, convinced that he was clean. He wasn't clean.
Shipping truth that isn’t powerful isn’t as attractive to your customers as truth that is. So you’re incentivized to develop truth that is. And you do this by hacking the accepted standards in knowledge pursuit by starting with a conclusion and working backwards. You tell a story based on the evidence that’s useful.
Now it’s “the science” or at the very least “there’s studies” and this is useful to both the customers (NGOs, journals, activists, lobbyists, media, anyone that wants to influence policy) and the university (attracts money, reputation and status) and the people shipping it (tenure, book deals, speaking fees).
It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just simple incentives. The poor guy who spends his time figuring out what the truth is not or that ships truth that isn’t immediately useful to the customers is looking for a new job after his grant dries up.
Incentive structures make sure that the latter is dominant in published science.
Even if there was no intentional fudging of data, results and interpretations by scientist teams, the results of science as a whole could still be heavily (over time) influenced by simple biases in selection of grant applications. For example if you only fund researches of type "thing X good" and dismiss all applications trying to prove "thing X bad", you will eventually gather enough evidence for X to appear good, regardless of how objectively "good" it is.
So it's not even about what is or is not true, or what is recognized as useful in the short term, it's that what defines truth at any given time is what is popularly believed to be true.
This sounds very flaky but it has real consequences because the incentives aren't just to find positive results, it's to find positive results that are likely to be accepted by the majority of the academic field. This kind of positive feedback loop is bound to lead to pressure because science almost by definition has to get some things incorrect — it's how progress is made. So people are actively punished for going against the grain, or exploring areas where our knowledge is limited and therefore prone to lots of negative results because we just don't know.
This is not true. Even during the 1904 Tour de France where 9 people were disqualifed because of, among other actions, illegal use of cars or trains [1] - 27 riders finished the race.
Tour de France in the modern era has up to 180+ competitors lining up, and there hasn't been a case of 100+ riders being disqualified for doping.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1904_Tour_de_France#Disqualifi...
There, the claim is that of the top 10 finishers, all but one participant were either stripped of result in that race or failed tests/were sanctioned for doping in another race.
(The remaining participant, originally #8 Cadel Evans, was a documented client of Michele Ferrari.)
My primary reason for believing this is that as a scientist myself, I've never done it, and none of my coauthors has ever proposed to do something like that. I have seen other kinds of fraud (e.g. ghost authorship) but not result manipulation.
But of course, If I were a fraudster myself I would also say that I've never done it :)
So a more general argument: scientific "doping" is just not as straightforward as cycling doping. In cycling, it's clear that if you don't get caught (and have no scruples) you benefit from doping, it makes you stronger.
In science, you first need an idea that looks original/promising, and then you do the experiments and see if the idea works or not. This kind of "doping" will only help if you (1) are good at generating ideas, but (2) these ideas often don't work. At least in my field, this is possible but far from the most common situation to be. And in other situations, there is not much benefit to faking results.
I have been joking with my former boss (who is a professor) about how easy it is to come up with good ideas. We each have five to six One Billion Dollar ideas before breakfast, and another 1-2 while in the shower! /s
Coming up with ideas is _ridicolously_ easy, executing on them is the hard part. If you're a seasoned researcher, it shouldn't be hard to guess at the "meta" of your field, you're probably aware of promising ideas discussed among your colleagues. What if you faked results, proving one of these ideas?
And the bar for cheating is _suprisingly_ low. I'm not a researcher myself, but I've experienced how my work is torn apart in peer review. But if you're dealing with data, apparently no one makes sure to actually check it before approval.[0][1]
[0] https://youtu.be/d2Tm3Yx4HWI?t=846 (analysis on the original data from the Francesca Gino scandal, which already looks suspicious without statistical analysis)
[1] https://youtu.be/KsSuhP60qnI (faked data from the Hendrik Schoen scandal at Bell Labs, as long as you make outrageous claims no one can verify, you can continue to publish in top journals)
> and then you do the experiments and see if the idea works or not
The problem is "if the idea works or not" can be very fuzzy. With a little p-hacking, anything can work! If nothing in your original data/experiment supports your hypothesis, you can just cherry pick some part of it that gives "significant" results.
Are you sure? Also a) how far along are you and b) how far from actual research work are you at this point?
For starters there’s so many performance enhancing substances, and entire underground industries for developing and producing them. All of these drugs would be banned by the blanket prohibition on unapproved substances, but in practice many of them don’t have any screening procedures, so won’t turn up in any tests.
There’s also the fact that many performance enhancing substances are biologically identical to substances your body is naturally producing (like bio-identical testosterone for example). The only way to test for these is to test the ratios of certain metabolites (with a margin for error to avoid false positives). In practice this basically means any athlete can do steroid cycles, as long as they are only boosting their test levels up to that of a genetically elite outlier.
You also have the therapeutic use exemption, which allows for legitimate therapeutic use of banned substances. Testosterone replacement therapy is a legitimate therapeutic use of steroids, and some sports are known for abusing TUEs for this usecase.
Testing for PEDs is way less precise than a lot of people think it is, and any motivated athlete can get away with PED use to some extent, no matter how much testing you subject them to. There’s good reason to be suspicious of a lot of athletes. One massively suspect category of athlete is all of the ones in/near their 40s who somehow manage to maintain physiques as good as/better than they had in their early 20s.
Once you get far enough in ANY sport, you start considering tradeoffs between risking long term health and improving performance. If you are a competent adult, you can evaluate your drivers, consider risks.
But without fail, in ANY competitive sport, you realise that you have to risk health in order to achieve that next performance tier, there is no other way.
Once you get into that 1-10%(depending on sport) elite level, you realise that there is no way you can compete without PEDs.
I've participated in (taken myself) and have been a witness to this in weightlifting(olympic and strongman), soccer, cycling and swimming. Starting young. Real young.
Coaches of different sanity levels are trusted to make the right choices and not often questioned by busy or absent parents.
Everyone cheers on when medals are won and records are broken, without consideration for how it happens.
I personally had no idea I was taking hormone modifiers until about 16, it started at 11.
My coach just gave me what he said were vitamins and I never questioned it, he was the closest thing to a father I had, his authority was absolute.
At 16 I found myself in a hospital yellow as a banana on the brink of liver failure, that's when I found out.
Everyone on our team took what the coaches gave. Once a while we'd see a parent get into a shouting match with one of the coaches about something we didn't understand and that kid would never come back again.
Some of the guys I trained with went on to become highly recognisable names in their respective sports. One even has a supplement brand. Those I've kept in touch with continue PED use, that is the price of being at the top of the game.
Not just a contest of hiding doping, but of winning against others who were doping. If everyone is doping, then you could argue it's still a fair playing field, just with a higher skill ceiling.
No, because now you have at least two contests in parallel: the race event for the cyclist and through-the-year "doping and not getting caught" for medical/management team.
For example one prominent olympic level swimmer was disqualified because they failed to appear for testing multiple times. Why would one do that just to come back after disqualification?
I can imagine some kind of first order phase transition in which the amount of fraudsters becomes so large that self correction breaks and instead they start to endorse each other. But that'd be evident from the outside, since science will stop producing real life results. We're definitely not there yet.
Fake is a spectrum. Soft faking is easy and widespread--"p-hacking" is the polite term.
The stakes for faking it are low because most research is low impact, most research is seldom reproduced, and even bad research is rarely retracted. For that which is reproduced there is plausible deniability--"researcher degrees of freedom". Getting a high impact study published is more important than having one retracted, so researchers follow that incentive structure.
> But that'd be evident from the outside, since science will stop producing real life results. We're definitely not there yet.
Have you taken a look at the biosciences, social sciences, and medicine? Basic research hasn't been reliable for decades.
I have had about three people working in the research fields that have used the term, off the record of course, "Publish or perish".
Get it out the door, try to get the funding and hopefully if it works out, solve the issues before it becomes a problem.
Some extracts:
"There were 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"
"At various times when concerns with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers emerged—in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-16, and March 2021—Dr.Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record."
"However, a second theme emerged among some of the interviewees that the same lab culture also 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)"
Considering that Stanford's special committee has every reason to protect Tessier-Lavigne and damage control, the findings are quite damning.
Good on Theo Baker for continuing to provide a more critical perspective compared to the cushy political speak of the report.
So basically the euphemism "lacked vigor" = "wasn't scientific" but since it wasn't "intentional" or "known" no-one can be blamed for it? Am I the only one who doesn't really care if bad science is intentional or fraudulent? They should be judged on their science, which was objectively dogshit, not on their morality, which is subjectively dogshit, but conveniently can't be judged by the relevant parties because everyone involved got amnesia.
Maybe I'm being too harsh but shadiness in public health really irritates me.
[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
I've read some of the papers that contain duplicated data; such duplications can be seen as "honest errors" similar to typos (e.g. maybe the file names were too similar?). It would be negligent of MTL to overlook these, even if it would not be fraud.
Broader, because fraudulent research is only one of the multiple crappy things that a person with no ethics will do to grab a place and keep it. But another common thing is academic abuse towards students, which is another HUGE problem that needs to be addressed. There's a lot of real crimes happening here, extortion, sexual abuse, you name it. Guess who's talking about it? Almost nobody.
Larger, because people tend to believe that these are just a few bad apples while in reality this is pretty much how many large academic institutions operate de facto. If I'd put an estimate of how many of these "bad apples" are actually there, I would say it is as high as 7 out of 10 people involved in academia.
I love science, I've been doing it for about 15 years. That is the reason why I'm very vocal around this subject. This is a swamp that needs to be drained.
Absolutely everyone involved in teaching (professors, instructors, grad students) are complicit in this scam. This endemic condition demonstrates the complete lack of integrity present in these institutions. If they are willing to lie and cheat the system that grants the very entry level credentials required to get into the upper echelons of academia, it becomes a very safe bet that they are lying and cheating in countless other ways from the comfort of their ivory towers.
how exactly did you make the leap to undergrads?
And institutions are very good and very fast at sweeping these under the rug, often if not always at the expense of the students.
Quite a claim if that's what you meant. Is this team members that are considered untouchable, due to being brilliant jerks/creeps, too important/connected, or otherwise inconvenient to go after?
The most I've personally heard of is lecturing professors berating the demo team (and students)... he was brilliant lecturer. Perhaps others hide it better.
I've heard it can work the opposite way, but I imagine it's not evenly applied. People get randomly fired from academia for the smallest of things.
Whenever "a gang of crooks" takes hold of a Uni, it is extremely difficult to take them out, and people who don't want to comply with their modus operandi get pushed away and removed.
The only time "a gang of crooks" is dethroned is when someone (usually, worse) seizes their power to instill their own.
>People get randomly fired from academia for the smallest of things.
Only those on the outgroup, :^).
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/about/
https://scienceintegritydigest.com/
She wrote an op-ed in the NYT last year: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/scien...
She says her work has led to 938 papers being retracted.
One of the interesting parts to me is that most of her work seems to be completely manual. She seems to have an eye for seeing photoshop on microscopy images or images of gels. The biggest method of fraud that she seems to find is researchers cutting and pasting from one image to another, for example, the scientist runs a gel but the results don't work out the way they hoped, so they paste in a line from another gel to make the experiment look like it worked.
The uncomfortable part is that this is just one of many ways that you could fabricate or alter research results, and Dr. Bik is only one person finding it in her spare time. Probably a whole lot of fraud goes undetected.
(Gift link, no paywall)
https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/sources-refused-to-part...
This incident is a case in point, and I wish media wouldn’t rush to publicize papers until they have been through much more extensive validation, replication and review. It’s especially worrying when primary medical research is enthusiastically rushed into the hands of doctors many years ahead of the systematic reviews that temper them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Som...
I think the problems start when you have a layman trying to understand a topic. You can find all kinds of papers and results with contradicting evidence, so you need foundational knowledge to interpret them.
Jerry Yang, as the same Jerry Yang that co-founded Yahoo. Didn’t know he is on the board of trustees at Stanford.
Yang & his wife have also given over $75 million to Stanford.
"researchers must avoid fooling themselves, be willing to question and doubt their own theories and their own results, and investigate possible flaws in a theory or an experiment. He recommended that researchers adopt an unusually high level of honesty which is rarely encountered in everyday life, and gave examples from advertising, politics, and psychology to illustrate the everyday dishonesty which should be unacceptable in science. Feynman cautioned,[3]
'We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.'"
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
The frauds and bad scientists will be found out, eventually.
The Stanford president mentioned is 63 years old and had a full academic career before being found out. It might even be that he remains financially well-off (I'm assuming his current role paid well for the last few years).
For every big case such as this one, how many more commit fraud without being noticed?
These quotes address what a scientist should do to do science, not what is practical to have a career in academia. The latter is more relevant in practice, because rigor and integrity don't get you tenure on their own.
I would say so. From one of the article:
> Tessier-Lavigne’s salary at Regeneron in 2014 was $1,764,032, according to a previously-unreported class action lawsuit alleging excessive compensation for members of the Compensation Committee, which included Tessier-Lavigne. It was later settled. He earned $1,555,296 from Stanford in 2021 with an additional $700,000 annually as a board director for Regeneron.
We always assume it's a tragic tale, and we're seeing someone crushed into a rock bottom state. It seems in many cases they still end up ahead of where they would be.
I even wondered if that would happen with Theranos. It's possible she's even ahead now of where she would be without fraud. I tend to think a lengthy prison sentence is never worth it, but if she had got off easier that would be a different story.
That's nice, but some frauds could potentially be very, very costly for society. There needs to be some deterrent as well.
Sadly, this is a hard scam to catch and most top researchers may never get enough scrutiny to get caught.
this just isn't true. you're assuming because you only see this every once in a while that it must be rare and policed effectively. it's actually the complete opposite - very common and not policed at all. the much more likely thing is that your paper with fabricated data will never be read. that's as good in the sense that no harm no foul but it still has the effect of padding out people's CVs that don't deserve it. but hey - don't hate the player hate the game is my motto.
1: https://news.stanford.edu/report/2023/05/03/persis-drell-ste...
A modern metaphor with a somewhat similar meaning to the original is: "A fish rots from the head down." Pointing out that organizational failures are usually the result of bad leadership. A rotten leadership will quickly result in a rotten organization. Therefore, it is important to make sure the leadership is not rotten in a organization. It also points out that low-level failures indicate there are deeper high-level failures. If the line-level is screwed up, the leadership is almost certainly just as screwed up. The fix being replacing the rotten leadership with a new one as lower-level fixes will not fix the rotten head.
Another, more direct equivalent metaphor is a Chinese saying translated as: "One piece of rat poop spoils the pot of soup." That is hopefully self-explanatory. We should probably use it instead of "a few bad apples" as nobody will reverse the meaning of that one.
But the larger issue here is that all public institutions are, by that definition, broken. For example, businesses also won't hesitate to spread falsehoods to sell their stuff, governments will try to convince their people that they are needed through propaganda and policing, and so on.
How do we solve these problems? We have laws to regulate what businesses can't do (nevermind lobbying), and we split governments' responsibility so that no single branch becomes too powerful. In general, we have several independent institutions that keep an eye on each other.
In case of science, we trust other scientists to replicate and confirm previous findings. It is a self-correcting mechanism, whereby sloppy or fraudulent research is eventually singled-out, as it happened in this and many other cases.
So I guess the gist of what I want to say is that you're right in not trusting a piece of research just because it was made by a reputable institute, but look for solid results that were replicated by independent researchers (and the gold standard here is replication, not peer review)
Giving up on science is such a vast overgeneralization. You could take your statement and replace "manipulated research", "scientific institutions" and "established scientific truth" with just about any negative article in any domain. You could just as easily make this statement about startups (Theranos, Juicero), or government, or religion, or suburbs, or cities...
Look at papers that have real impact they get cited. Look at ones that don’t …
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artifici...
https://reproducible.cs.princeton.edu/
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018Sci...359..725H/abstra...
Considering that we get fraud every time we have humans and prestige money, I would really like to see some statistics against other things human activities. I suspect science still has some of the lowest fraud rates and the strongest mechanisms to detect and deal with it.
The fact that a Stanford president can be pushed out for bad research conducted before he was even there? It tells me there’s still some integrity left.
I personally believe this is an underestimate.
We do get unbelievable findings such as CRISPR, but beware these will be very few and far between.
Scientific consensus is still very reliable and if 95% of accredited scientists in a field say something is true it is in society's best interest to consider that to be the truth.
Bad things are gonna happen in every single institution ever created. A better measure is how long those things persist.
Science is about getting closer to "the truth". Sometimes science goes further away from the truth, sometimes it gets closer. Sometimes bad actors get us further away from the truth. It gets reconciled eventually.
I completely agree. Seeing slack chats and emails regarding Proximal Origin and how researchers were disagreeing with it all the way until they published a paper that served what purpose are really disheartening. Instead of guiding future research toward preventing similar outcomes, countless scientists spent untold years of combined effort on a theory the authors didn’t even believe.
Just the fact that Stanford managed to conduct an independent investigation against its OWN PRESIDENT, tells very positive things about the University.
After this episode, I might trust Stanford research even a bit more than any University that never caught fraudsters.
Every time a plane crashes it's international news. But just because you regularly hear about plane crashes doesn't mean flying is unsafe.
For every one of these stories you hear, I am aware of others that will never ever see the light of day.
It seems that you are in a position to change that, but choose not to. Why?
Even in the Enron case, I know a bunch of people who were snapped up from Enron after they collapsed. The Enron fraud was concentrated among relatively few people at the company, so it's not like their failure tarnished people who weren't in on the fraud.
And after six iterations of this it just never pans out. Real replication is whether you can reliably build on top of a previous study.
Damn my father has Alzheimer's, so this really hurts deep.
Yes, but it must meet a strict standard of intent. Jailing scientists based on the content of their work is generally risky. If you create specific areas where prosecution is likely, you're more likely to dissuade research than increase quality.
The present problem appears to be the fraud has a low probability of being caught. Improving that might have better pay-offs than deepening consequences for the minority who get found out.
Fraud in science is a problem in that the very small minority of actors that conduct themselves unethically has had massive reach with groups that seek to discredit science.
20 years ago, being science illiterate was seen as bad for you. Today, 50% of us believe that being science illiterate is a positive trait in people seeking presidency.
Jail or not, these people are causing significant public issues, so I’ll have to agree. It’s not going to reduce it, but still, fuck them for the damage they’ve wrought.
Oof, I couldn't disagree more. As a society we should be moving away from punitive measures and toward systemic reform. I don't think the prospect of prison time is going to deter people from playing the game they feel they have to in order to get research funding.
i think that technological complexity kind of snuck up on many fields and it has taken time for the very competitive research culture to adapt.
releasing data was a complicated proposition back in the 2000s, where today more and more are appreciating the need for it.
i think the real solution to all these problems comes from adjusting the funding model. there should be more money available for those who are willing to do the less exciting work of completely reproducing pivotal results from scratch.
I think something like fines equivalent to the amounts of the grants for the institution, and professional censure and a ban from working in grant-funded research for the researcher, would be more effective and appropriate than prison.
My wife is doing her PhD and the stories she tells me are absolutely scary. It's about how you can easily fake your entire research, manipulate the numbers and writing a borderline fictional thesis and still earn your PhD. And all that with no oversight, and in lots of cases, the little oversight there is turns the blind eye because the professors have a lot to gain from having their name mentioned in the papers.
This speaks volumes about his character. Any organization led by someone with questionable ethics poisons the trust and confidence of the entire organization. So good for him!
Those kinds of ethics questions have a real impact on everyone else in the organization trying to do the right thing - as they bear the reputational harm with much less ability to just choose to go elsewhere.
Knowingly, or even just negligently, putting your colleagues and employees in such a situation is a tragedy of leadership.
It’s important to recognize that this would be a different story had he been ousted and protested or attempted a cover up. People mess up, but sometimes that means you don’t get to be a leader anymore. That’s what’s happening here and it seems like the right way we should treat these things.
I suppose it reveals that he resigned under pressure that forced him to after allegedly writing numerous falsified papers that led to his current credentials.
Not sure that’s an ethics gold star or anything. I guess it’s better than “they’ll take me out of my office in a casket” and digging in, but still shows massive ethical failures and since ethics are usually not compartmentalized means that there’s probably other bad news that’s not revealed yet.
I think the right way would have not to falsified research. Or to come clean on your own and resign before it’s a stink.
As it is now, it’s bad for Stanford. And means the hiring committee didn’t do sufficient due diligence to even ask people on his field if his work was valid.
> The report concluded that the fudging of results under Tessier-Lavigne’s purview “spanned labs at three separate institutions.” It identified a culture where Tessier-Lavigne “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).”
> There was no evidence that Tessier-Lavigne himself manipulated data in the papers reviewed, the report concluded, nor that he knew about manipulation at the time, but he “has not been able to provide an adequate explanation” for why he did not correct the scientific record when presented the opportunity on multiple occasions. In his statement, Tessier-Lavigne wrote that he was “gratified that the Panel concluded I did not engage in any fraud or falsification of scientific data.”
In other words, he created a culture in which fraud could be expected, and he didn't address it properly when it was brought to his attention. I'm not giving him any gold stars for ethics. But as far as I know, he didn't personally falsify research.
> And means the hiring committee didn’t do sufficient due diligence to even ask people on his field if his work was valid.
Detecting fraudulent results isn't always easy. If there was already a public controversy about his papers and they didn't pick up on that, that was a failing. In the worst case, faked results can only be detected by running a study over again and getting a different result -- and even then, it's hard to rule out some difference that wasn't properly controlled for, an honest mistake somewhere, or just bad luck.
The standard of truth in science isn't peer review, it's having results that are consistently reproducible.
>Or to come clean on your own and resign before it’s a stink.
I feel like this is what is happening, so we must be thinking on different timelines.
As it is now, it’s bad for Stanford. And means the hiring committee didn’t do sufficient due diligence to even ask people on his field if his work was valid.
To be clear, there's no net-positive here, it's still net-negative and I agree that everyone is worse overall. The thing I'm pointing to though is that this was the best outcome from an already bad situation and is done in a way that is transparent and is actually addressing harms and preventing further harm by changing the power structures.
You'll notice he doesn't say "I regret my actions and the harm I caused". Just a vague allusion to "such discussions". As if the people discussing him falsifying research are somehow the problem. When someone goes down for a scandal, they rarely express true remorse or take responsibility. It's always "I'm sorry... that I got caught".
His response speaks to his character, but I'm not sure it says what you think it does.
> Tessier-Lavigne defended his reputation ... "issues with his research" ... "discussions"
Meaning he believes he did nothing wrong and he's the target of "character assassination" by the Daily but he's being forced out by colleagues who want Harvard to come out of this scandal with half a shred of dignity. This is not him saying "aww, you got me, aight I'm out". This is him continuing to be a narcissistic, shitty human being refusing to admit that he could possibly be in the wrong in any way.
I agree, good for him to humbly resign and not drag the reputation of the bigger institution into questionable territory. The news came as a shock this morning but it's a well written letter he publicly posted.
I think it's very early to give a positive judgment for MTL's decision to resign. First of all, the most serious allegation by the Stanford Daily — that MTL knew of fraud at his Genentech lab and made an effort to cover it up — is still denied by MTL, Stanford, and Genentech.
Either MTL & Genentech are lying, or the Daily made a mistake in its reporting. As of now, the Daily still stands by its reporting and Theo Baker published a follow-up about how Stanford's investigation may have been fundamentally flawed [0]
But let's assume that the Daily is wrong, MTL's resignation statement omitted any accountability for the lesser but still damning charge: negligent leadership that fostered a research culture optimized (inadvertently or not) for fraud. As the Daily puts it:
> The report concluded that the fudging of results under Tessier-Lavigne’s purview “spanned labs at three separate institutions.” It identified a culture where Tessier-Lavigne “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that is, postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’
In MTL's letter to Stanford [1], he limits his culpability to not being diligent enough in correcting the errors and alleged fraud, all of which were the fault of his subordinates:
> I agree that in some instances I should have been more diligent when seeking corrections, and I regret that I was not. 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.
> ...These findings have also caused me to further reassess the processes and controls I have in place. While I continually maintain a critical eye on all the science in my lab, I have also always operated my lab on trust – trust in my students and postdocs, and trust that the data they were presenting to me was real and accurate.
I get that there's a limit to how much self-flagellation he can do right now, but he's basically limited his culpability to: "my biggest weakness is that I respect and trust my colleagues and students too much!" In this era of Stanford-associated stories like Theranos and FTX, the prospect and danger of a leader who fosters fraudulent "winners" is something that should be addressed explicitly.
[0] https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/sources-refused-to-part...
[1] https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/message-stanfo...
I know a prominent alum who was able to get her kids into undergrad at Stanford, but not into their professional schools. Considering where they went after being rejected from Stanford, they were not remotely in the ballpark. It's good to know that there are limits to legacy admissions, even for rich/famous alums.
I wonder if any economists have tried to measure the $ cost of fake research.
the comment doesn't say any of that, just that resources are wasted participating to these "conversations"
Anyway, it would not be fair to automatically invalidate papers citing retracted ones. Including:
- reproduction attempts
- some minor citation in related works
- it's usually not obvious that a paper is manipulated or even wrong without any bad faith involved
Now, I wish we could update papers with disclaimers and notes, but again, we are dealing with good old PDFs that are never going to be updated…
Good luck even noticing that a paper was retracted.
I wish we had better formats and publication processes.
None of those require the paper you're citing to be free from fraud: seminal works with fraudulent or inaccurate results may still have preparation methods that are applicable to novel, non-fraudulent, experimental techniques and equations are rarely at issue with data manipulation or other fraud.
There's still space to be aware of retracted papers in citations as building directly on those results and managing to show an improvement on doctored data would be suspicious but I'm pretty sure that is the minority of citations in many fields.
Nothing would ever get done if this was the bar for citation. Real advancements take place on the back of fraudulent results in widely cited papers. Actually, even within papers that have fraudulent results, advancements happen.
The motivation for such fraud is because work generally wont get published without positive results, even if the work was excellent. The fraud doesn't take the place of hard/great work. I'm not defending the practice.
And then when will that "saved" money go? A high-speed rail? I don't think so. A tax cut for private jet owners? Probably: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/18/melanie-da...
With zero spending, there will be zero waste and corruption. I will create zero bugs if I write zero code.
Just like VCs expect a tremendous amount of waste when going for wealth appreciation, so should countries expect waste when investing in science, research, and innovation. There will be waste, there will be fraud, but the options are either play the game or be left in the Middle Ages.
In the same fashion, let's have innocent children go hungry because some adults abuse social programs. Let's stop all military R&D because some contractors are overcharging.
I am surprised that Marc didn't retract a fourth paper, based on: https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/sources-refused-to-part...
https://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/20010006....
My prediction is a well rehearsed closing of ranks and naked abuse of anyone questioning integrity.
Not all psych research will be unreliable just like not all professional cyclists take drugs, maybe, given the apt tour de France Armstrong analogy made by rossdavidh here.
In some domains, the call to break this vicious cycle is already happening. E.g. ACM Sigcomm is one of the most prestigious and exclusive conference in Networking and Distributed Systems research. Some of the most profound researchers in that domain are driving a pledge to fundamentally rethink what the conference accepts and what gets presented: https://sigcomm.quest/proposal.html.
This is a terrible idea. People will have friends who get their papers in, in return for the favor of the same.
Agree with your general point though. No easy answers though.
But this is already the case. In some fields even double blind doesn't work because community members are aware of each others research. If you're one of two people worldwide who's specific specialization is the compression of semantic knowledge streams, you're probably willing to be money on your ability to spot your colleagues research.
I am honestly very curious who hasn't observed the same behavior in large corporations too. (And to be clear, I'm not defending this behavior; rather curious if it's not an unfortunate generalized situation that occurs not only in academia).
Secondly, I encourage every interested reader here to pull up the actual report and read it. (The report and other statements from the board can be found on the board's website [0].) In a large laboratory, both honest mistakes and intentional data manipulation will occur. They just will. There is no evidence to suggest Tessier-Lavigne participated knowingly in fraudulent activity. All the evidence points to the fact that he was made aware of the issues at some point or another, proceeded to take some corrective action, but did not ultimately do enough. Pass your judgments on his actions and inactions, by all means, but make sure you're passing judgment on what happened, not on the impression you get of what happened from reading news articles.
Or students and postdocs threatened with presenting or publishing null findings that run counter to senior scientists' previously published theories.
Etc etc etc
Also: "will resign effective August 31"??? Shouldn't this guy be locked out of his office, have his laptop confiscated, and be banned from campus immediately?
It depends on the nature of the fraud.
I'm no fan of academia (see my post history), but this has to be close to the bottom of my list of priorities. The last car salesman I interacted with probably deserves more jail time than even the most unscrupulous academic (and the car salesman actually did commit a crime, but prosecution would be highly surprising). Medical and drug insurance is another case where there is systematic, intentional, and legal fraud literally killing people every day. The insurance case in particular is pernicious and full of literally deadly Catch-22 "tricks". See also all the obviously criminal web3 stuff that will definitely hit statute of limitations before any LE/prosecutor finds the time to investigate and prosecute.
Most fraudsters don't see any legal punishment because LE and prosecutor time is so limited relative to the amount of fraud. And in the worst cases because the fraudsters have so much money and power that even obvious bullshit is at least de facto not criminal (see insurance).
So, anyways. Should it be criminal? Yes. Is it criminal? IDK. Probably somehow. Is it where finite resources should be spent? Not usually; IMO there are far worse types of fraud where the people's LE+legal+legislative resources should be spent.
> Also: "will resign effective August 31"??? Shouldn't this guy be locked out of his office, have his laptop confiscated, and be banned from campus immediately?
Conjecture: there is probably a lot of "hand-off" work to be done. Excluding my first two jobs, where I was a junior/mid-level IC, I have always been asked to stay a least a month longer than the typical 2 weeks to handle hand-offs.
I guess the best we can hope for is that the last month of employment is living hell as he has to attend a bunch of hand-off meetings as a totally disgraced academic/leader.
Theres no accountability.
It should but it probably wont.
Again, the optimal amount of research misconduct isn't zero!
Are amyloid plaques not an issue at all then, or coincidentally still an issue (but not justified by the research this person did)? Would be funny if this is a real world Gettier case.
Otherwise the estimates of published research being manipulated range from 20 percent to being a majority and it’s difficult to get corrections or retractions.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea... http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3655010/ http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n9/full/nrd3439-c1.htm... http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
11 authors? I thought the kickbacks of "I'll publish your name on my paper if you publish my name on yours" in Computer Science were bad...
It appears we are caught in an inevitable cycle: success in academia is intrinsically tied to more published papers. That inevitably fosters widespread fraud, as a small proportion of unscrupulous individuals will ultimately corrupt the entire system. As noted in the report, his lab had trend of favoring the winners.
Furthermore, we need to consider that there are very powerful external influencer such as politics and corporations, which can sometimes lead to the distortion of data.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/19/stanford...
"A panel of experts concluded that Tessier-Lavigne, a neuroscientist who has been president of Stanford for nearly seven years, did not engage in any fraud or falsification of scientific data. It also did not find evidence that he was aware of problems before publication of data."
They couldn't prove he personally did the manipulation.
He oversaw work at three different institutions over two decades that resulted in manipulated data by someone, and didn't issue corrections when those manipulations were pointed out. If he didn't do it, he was incompetent or uninterested in fixing the issues.
> Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract at least three papers
https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-res...
> But the 22-page report (plus appendices) found “serious flaws” in all five papers on which Tessier-Lavigne is corresponding or senior author: the 1999 Cell paper, the two 2001 Science papers, a 2004 Nature paper, and the 2009 Nature paper from Genentech. In four of these studies, the investigation found “apparent manipulation of research data by others.” For example, in one case, a single blot from the 2009 Cell paper was used in three different experiments, and a blot from that paper was reused in one of the 2001 Science papers.
> The 2004 Nature paper also contains manipulated images, the report found. Although the report says the allegations of fraud and a cover-up at Genentech involving the 2009 Nature paper were “mistaken”—people likely conflated the fraudulent paper a year earlier, and Genentech scientists’ problems replicating the work, it suggests—that paper showed “a lack of rigor” that falls below standards.
https://www.science.org/content/article/stanford-president-t...
PubPeer alsoshows which papers they've been involved with that has "Errata" or "Expression of Concern": https://pubpeer.com/search?q=authors%3A+%22tessier-lavigne%2...
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10399920/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11239160/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15510105/
To elaborate:
From [0], "...To date, all three of these papers (Cell ’99, Science ’01 Binding, Science ’01 Silencing) remain published....Dr. Tessier-Lavigne has stated to the Panel that he intends to retract all three papers."
Also from [0], "As to the five reviewed papers where Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author...Specifically, a group of three papers contain images that are the result of manipulation of research data (Cell ’99, Science ’01 Binding, Science ’01 Silencing)...A fourth primary paper also contains images (which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not personally prepare) that indicate manipulation of research data (Nature ’04)....The Panel understands that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne now intends to retract at least three publications on which he is a principal author".
For the four papers named in the quotes above, citations and links appear below [1-4]. I'd suggest reading [0] (as linked from OP's article) for more details. There are other papers discussed in [0], too.
[0] https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2023/07/Scientific-Panel-Final-Report.pdf
[1] Cell ’99: Hong K, Hinck L, Nishiyama M, Poo MM, Tessier-Lavigne M, Stein E. A ligand-gated association between cytoplasmic domains of UNC5 and DCC family receptors converts netrin-induced growth cone attraction to repulsion. Cell. 1999;97(7):927-941. doi:10.1016/s0092-8674(00)80804-1, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10399920/
[2] Science ’01 Binding: Stein E, Zou Y, Poo M, Tessier-Lavigne M. Binding of DCC by netrin-1 to mediate axon guidance independent of adenosine A2B receptor activation. Science. 2001;291(5510):1976-1982. doi:10.1126/science.1059391, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11239160/
[3] Science ’01 Silencing: Stein E, Tessier-Lavigne M. Hierarchical organization of guidance receptors: silencing of netrin attraction by slit through a Robo/DCC receptor complex. Science. 2001;291(5510):1928-1938. doi:10.1126/science.1058445, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11239147/
[4] Nature ’04: Lu X, Le Noble F, Yuan L, et al. The netrin receptor UNC5B mediates guidance events controlling morphogenesis of the vascular system. Nature. 2004;432(7014):179-186. doi:10.1038/nature03080, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15510105/```It identified a culture where Tessier-Lavigne “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).”
If his excuse of not enough detail investigation of lab reported data before sub mitting research report than should not same lack of skillset be a requirement for his firing form Stanford board?
Can a doctor, and lawyer remain in his profession after such a malpractice?
PS: Politicians dont count. Corrupt as they maybe, they still have to face the music every 4-5 years.
For several months I've noticed that any story about Academia that hints at a problem, or a misstatement, or something over-stated, anything dealing with science, there is just a mad rush to grab torches and scythes, pikes, etc... "Crucify", these people are all con-men.
But, if it's a tech company, then all good, just lie all you want, that's just salesmanship, 'selling hype' to promote a product.
I fear it is part of the 'post-truth' America where nothing is trusted.
There just isnt enough accountability of the people at the top.
Also the co-founder of Yahoo!.
While it may be difficult at times to maintain ethics and integrity, it's always worth the commitment. Always.
Science is self-correcting. Not always right. This is part of what self-correction looks like. It beats all known alternatives.
Some of the biggest problems with the current system are:
* Peer Review has its share of problems[1][2][3] that create horrible second order effects, especially among those pursuing PhDs[4]
* Elsevier, Nature, Science/AAAS and others perform rent-seeking behavior to the extent where I think it's worth asking whether they hinder the funding and dissemination of good science more than they help. As a personal aside, I always found it very off-putting that DeepMind regularly publishes in Nature in Science, despite the fact that outside of AlphaFold, their work often has little overlap with the readership that typically frequents these journals.
Personally, I am of the opinion that platforms like Semantic Scholar, arXiv and OpenReview are doing a better job of promoting open and transparent academic research with improved accessibility to both the public and the researchers doing good work.
Given the power of being mentored by great scientists, it makes sense to have filtering processes which concentrate great researchers in a small amount of schools. My point is that if there is too little oversight, these institutions become incentivized to all but encourage bad behavior in order to maintain their image. We need systems which encourage MORE transparency into the process of creating science and MORE accessibility because an important part of scientific research is it's uncertainty.
Tools like arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and OpenReview are all steps in the right direction, and it would be good to promote the useage of these tools outside of their current userbase as I think they provide a system for people to observe science more easily, and for important parts of the research process to be accessed by all.
1: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/115231/why-is-p...
2: https://blog.neurips.cc/2021/12/08/the-neurips-2021-consiste...
3: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/19498...
4: https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac...
``` APersonWhoCanRead 3 months ago
It seems to me that the linked report goes as close as possible to accusing MTL of fraud as one could hope given that it's coming from Genentech lawyers that are trying to keep the company out of trouble:
"In order to assess whether the 2009 Nature paper contains duplicate images, the diligence team consulted an independent, outside expert who specializes in detecting image manipulations in scientific publications. This expert concluded that two sets of figures, Figures 1d and 5e and Supplementary Figures 9c and 17c, include duplicate images. The expert also concluded that a Western blot panel for Caspase 6 in Supplementary Figure 6d appears to include a composite of two images. We have not determined how these anomalies occurred."
"Genentech scientists and research associates had difficulty reproducing certain results reported in the 2009 Nature paper, in particular, the binding interaction between DR6 and N-APP (the N-terminal portion of APP). Prior to publication of the paper, employees other than the authors performed binding experiments that showed inconsistent results – sometimes binding between DR6 and N-APP was detected, and other times, it was not. Some of the employees who performed those experiments attributed the inconsistent results to variability in the purity and quality of the reagents used." --> Clearly, some employees attributed the inconsistent results differently - I'm guessing as fraud. --> These determinations were made before the paper, which contained fabricated data (c.f. above), was published. Clearly, the first author would have been told, and most likely also MTL.
"Senior leaders at Genentech including Dr. Tessier-Lavigne knew of the inconsistent binding results, and there was uncertainty and speculation within the Genentech Research organization about why the binding interaction between DR6 and N-APP could not be reliably reproduced or confirmed."
"Also following Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s departure, one senior leader in gRED urged that the 2009 Nature paper should be retracted or corrected in light of the inconsistent binding results. Other senior leaders recognized at the time that this was an action only Dr. Tessier-Lavigne or another co-author could take with the journal." --> MTL was asked to retract and did not.
TLDR: the report is very damning. Why don't you try to dispute some of the facts reported by the Daily, instead of writing nebulously that their headline is misleading.
```
UPDATE: To clarify, that comment is responding to another comment saying "the report is very positive for MTL"
[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2023/04/06/stanford-president-rese...
[2] https://www.gene.com/download/pdf/Findings-of-2023-Genentech...
Think about it - a domain expert will do a far better job of faking data than a random joe, and will be aware of most statistical tests that could find out.
No matter how well educated, they’re still just people and biology is optimized for success.
At this point society needs to have a good long think about enabling the reach of any specific individual.
Our math is not holistic truth as it’s been shown there can never be one true set of axioms. All philosophy is relative to human awareness and agreement. The masses have always agreed rent seekers are leaches who externalize providing for themselves.
We need to stop creating landed gentry; they’re all just one of billions like the rest. The work is important, not their figurative identity; we don’t need them to carry out the work.
3 months labor, 3 months off, 6 months white collar work. A rotation such as that would effectively act as term limits on social influence.
This, and I cant stress this enough, is a good thing. You've probably complained that people spend way too much time waffling nonsense instead of simply writing the ingredients in cooking recipies. Scientific papers ARE the list of ingredients without anything else. If you feel like they missed three steps, go back and actually read it, bit by bit. Read the prior art if youre really confused. You simply cannot skim read them, each sentence is important.
I'm glad to see someone take some personal responsibility that isn't forced on them (that we know of). I realize that I don't know enough about the circumstances to know if this is "enough", and I am curious about his staying on as faculty, but from purely appearances this is a pleasant surprise given most recent public figure screw-ups have just posted through it.
So we basically take the brightest minds and have them compete in a gladiatorial rate race. This system is so broken that something fundamental has to change here.
There are a lot of good honest hard working people losing out, but you won't find them at an administrator luncheon because they are spending 70h in the lab every week on a temp contract.
"The report ... identified a culture where Tessier-Lavigne “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).”"