Stanford University president to resign after questions raised over integrity of his research

Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced that he will submit his resignation after concerns over the integrity of his research were raised. Tessier-Lavigne announced that he will be stepping down.

In a letter to staff and students on Wednesday (July 19), Tessier-Lavigne stated that he is stepping down because he thinks there will be a continued debate around his ability to head the university.

“I’ve never submitted a scientific paper without firmly believing that the data were correct and accurately presented,” the president said.

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However, he accepted that he should have been more diligent in seeking corrections related to his work.

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The announcement was made after the board of trustees of the historic university, which is often called the “Ivy of the West” and is located in the heart of Silicon Valley, started reviewing allegations of ethical misconduct and fraud around papers which were authored or co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne last year.

In the review, 12 papers that Tessier-Lavigne had worked on were assessed, which included five in which he was the principal author.

The allegations of misconduct in the work were first aired on PubPeer, which is a website where scientific community's members discuss their research paper, stated the final report of the panel.

Serious allegations against president cleared

The most serious allegation against the president, which was the fraud investigation carried out on a 2009 paper on a model of neurodegeneration published in the scientific journal Nature, was cleared by the panel. Neurodegeneration models can have great potential for research and therapy of Alzheimer’s disease.

The panel ruled that they did not discover any fraud in the research papers. However, they concluded that the paper had multiple problems, which included a lack of rigour in its development. They added that the research that went into the paper and its presentation had “various errors and shortcomings”. No evidence of Tessier-Lavigne being aware of the lack of rigour was found by the panel.

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“People tend to think of scientists as these individuals that they’ve heard of like Einstein and Marie Curie,” stated H Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals. “The truth is that researchers run laboratories filled with people, and everything that happens in that laboratory is a product of many individuals there," he added.

Even though Tessier-Lavigne was cleared of research misconduct by the report, Thorp said that the boss is ultimately held responsible for what takes place in the lab and shouldn't get distracted by doing other jobs. The panel discovered that “the unusual frequency of manipulation of research data and/or substandard scientific practices” suggested a requirement for improved “oversight and management”.

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