Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford University’s president, is pushing back against claims that a scientific research paper on which he was lead author contained falsified data, a serious charge that has brought new urgency to a review of the acclaimed neuroscientist’s past work.
The charges come amid an ongoing review of Tessier-Lavigne’s work. In December, the chairman of Stanford’s Board of Trustees announced the creation of a special committee to look into other research misconduct allegations made against the president. That review followed earlier reporting from the Stanford Daily, which raised concerns about possibly manipulated images in other papers Tessier-Lavigne co-authored. The allegations date back many years, and Tessier-Lavigne said in December that he had “corresponded extensively” with the journals in question.
The allegations have thrust the president of one of the world’s most respected research universities into a highly public fight over his reputation as a scientist. In a statement to The Washington Post on Tuesday, Tessier-Lavigne said, “I know I acted with complete integrity at every stage of my career, at Genentech, before and after. The allegations of wrongdoing against me are completely false. I am confident that when all the facts come out I will be fully vindicated.”
On campus Tuesday, several Stanford students said they saw the controversy swirling around Tessier-Lavigne as evidence of a larger problem: the pressure on scientists to publish groundbreaking work. “There are probably tons of cases where, whether people have or have not fudged something, they have felt pressured enough to consider it,” said Elisabeth Meyer, a doctoral student in biochemistry at Stanford.
Sanjana Khurana, a freshman majoring in economics, said she worried about reputational damage to the university. “You don’t want people to have to cheat and lie,” she said. “That’s not the impression you want the university to create.”
The special committee reviewing misconduct allegations is being advised by five well-known scientists, all members of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine or both. The group is aware of the allegations regarding the 2009 paper and is evaluating them as part of its work, said Aidan Ryan, a spokesman for the committee.
The special committee has provided no timeline for the conclusion of its work. Meanwhile, Tessier-Lavigne has escalated his own defense — putting the university president in a contentious posture toward Stanford’s student newspaper. On Friday, the president said in a letter to the Stanford community that the newspaper’s reporting was “replete with falsehoods” and betrayed a “misunderstanding of science and the scientific process.” Tessier-Lavigne described the article’s central claims — falsification of data and a coverup — as “breathtakingly outrageous.”
Theo Baker, the Stanford Daily reporter who wrote the article, said: “We’re really proud of the thoroughness and the effort that went into this story. We spent a lot of time trying to make it as fair and accurate as possible, and I think the quality of our journalism hopefully reflects that.”
Baker this week was given a special George Polk Award in journalism for his coverage.
Ken Thompson, a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford’s biology department, said any investigation of the university’s president would need to be unimpeachably independent. Several members of the committee, including its chair, are members of the university’s Board of Trustees. That’s a red flag, Thompson said.
“It’s pretty clear at this point that a more independent investigation is warranted,” Thompson said. Universities and private companies tend to do what serves their own interests, he said, and “the whole process needs to be removed” from Stanford.
After the first wave of allegations, seven Stanford professors signed a letter in the Stanford Daily, urging their colleagues not to rush to judgment. None of the faculty members responded to interview requests on Tuesday. One of them, William T. Newsome, a neurobiology professor, said in an email that the president’s own summary of the science behind his work “easily passes my personal smell test for normal science.”
“I see nothing alarming here,” Newsome wrote, “except that Alzheimer’s disease remains frustratingly refractory to our best scientific efforts to defeat it.”
There are a lot of private conversations on campus about the allegations, he wrote, and “opinions vary widely.” People are concerned and “watching the situation pretty closely,” Newsome said, but most are waiting for the committee to do its work.
‘Truth in this matter’
Fighting to defend his reputation, Tessier-Lavigne and his lawyer have said the president was not ever aware of any investigation into his paper — much less that he covered up its results. Genentech gave a similar statement. The company, spokesperson Stephanie Huang said, has a committee that reviews research as a matter of routine. But Genentech “found no documentation substantiating allegations of a Genentech investigation, scientific fraud, misconduct, or other wrongdoing in the research work leading to the 2009 Nature paper.”
At the same time, the company said it was “undertaking additional efforts” to look into the matter. “We take the allegations made in the Stanford Daily article very seriously,” Huang said. “As we made clear to the reporter, we want to understand the truth in this matter.”
The 2009 paper that is under scrutiny generated attention for its suggestion that the cause of Alzheimer’s disease might reside with a different parent protein than what most scientists agreed at the time, said Matthew Schrag, an Alzheimer’s expert. The hypothesis isn’t widely embraced by scientists in the field today, Schrag said; that is the nature of science, not evidence of misconduct. But Schrag, who is an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University, said that in his opinion, the recent allegations demand greater transparency around what happened.
It is incumbent upon Genentech, Tessier-Lavigne or the whistleblowers to “bring forward documentation,” Schrag said. “The accusations are quite serious.”
Karen Alexander in Palo Alto, Calif., contributed to this report.
correction
A previous version of this article misstated the role of five scientists involved in a review of Stanford's president. The scientists are not members of a special committee handling the review, but will offer advice. This article has been corrected.