Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizens Sancu and Muirseth for their clue delivery! The president of Stanford took the blame and resigned because of the controversy over academic misconduct.

He is the main author of 5 related papers, 3 withdrew and 2 revised, all from the three major journals in the field of biology, Science, Nature and Cell, and many of them were published 20 years ago and cited hundreds of times, which is an important research in the industry.

Half a year ago, an investigation into academic misconduct launched by a sophomore at Stanford and a special working group set up by the Stanford university has finally reached a final result:

Marc Tessier Lavigne co-authored several papers on academic misconduct, but there is no evidence that he was involved in falsifying and tampering with data, mainly due to "improper manipulation by his staff".

Lavigne ceased to be president of Stanford from August 31 and continued to teach.

As soon as the news came out, it immediately aroused heated discussion from all walks of life.

The editor of Science commented:

This example is a good example of why being the head of a lab can't be a part-time job.

The suspected papers include key Alzheimer's disease research, Lavigne, who joined Stanford University as president from Rockefeller University in New York in 2016. As a neuroscientist, he has been a leader in brain and spinal cord research.

His research is mainly focused on the etiology and treatment of degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, as well as the treatment of spinal cord injury. Many important studies in the field of Alzheimer's disease have been published in top journals such as Nature and Science.

Prior to Rockefeller University, he was the chief scientific officer of Genentech, where he was responsible for cancer, immune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases research and drug development.

According to the report of the investigation working group, there are mainly five papers suspected of fraud, including two Science papers in 2001, a Nature paper in 2003, an EMBO Journal paper in 2008, and a Cell paper in 1999.

These five papers have been hammered with problems, of which 3 will be withdrawn and 2 will be corrected.

In terms of seriousness, withdrawal and major amendments are no trivial matter. According to statistics, only 4 out of every 10000 papers are withdrawn, and the correction is also a major revision.

Briefly review the 5 papers in question.

The paper, about receptors in the brain, published on EMBO in 2008, has been downloaded more than 4000 times. As you can see, the two experimental pictures are exactly the same, almost "directly copied and pasted".

This paper, published in Science in 2003, has been cited more than 600 times. The research topic of this paper is of great significance for understanding the process of vascular development and angiogenesis.

The controversial point is also obvious that the pictures in the paper that are supposed to represent different experimental results seem to be the rotation of the same picture and being reused.

The results of this paper, published in Science in 2001, provide important clues to understand the molecular mechanism of neuronal axonal growth and orientation. At present, it has been downloaded more than 2000 times and has been cited nearly 200 times.

The controversial points of this paper are consistent with the above, and the imprints in figures B and D are copied.

Another paper, also published in Science in 2001, has had a significant impact on the field of neural development and axonal guidance. At present

It has been downloaded more than 2700 times and has been cited nearly 455 times.

If you look closely, you can find that in the 28th stage of the experiment, the diagrams of 0 hour and 1 hour are exactly the same, but the size has changed.

There is also this paper, published in Cell in 1999, on the molecular regulatory mechanisms of neuronal axonal branching.

Apart from the above five, the most controversial and influential paper was co-authored by Lavigne, then a biotech executive, published on Nature in 2009, claiming to have found the cause of brain degeneration in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

The publication of this paper caused a sensation, and even that year Nature published a special article entitled "the Theory of Alzheimer's Disease caused a sensation".

After the publication of the paper, Lavigne was successfully promoted to Chief Scientific Officer of Genentech, responsible for leading a team of more than 1400 scientists.

But then the company's scientists suddenly found that the results could never be replicated.

So in 2011, the Genentech Research Review Board conducted an internal review and found that some of the data in the paper were falsified, but given that it had occurred for many years and there was no direct evidence:

Indicates that there is no fraud or misconduct.

Because of the controversy over counterfeiting, this paper has been marked with a warning label by Science to remind readers to quote it carefully.

So how on earth did a scientific research guru and president of a famous university be found to be "academic misconduct"? It all starts with a sophomore at Stanford.

Sophomores at Stanford launched an entire survey focusing on Lavigne, which began at the end of November last year.

Prior to this, several papers in Lavigne's name have been controversial about academic misconduct, but most of them are discussed in the public. It was not until an important piece of information published in the Stanford Daily, a student newspaper at Stanford University, that it finally led to a formal investigation by the Stanford University.

On November 29 last year, Theo Baker, a sophomore at Stanford, revealed that a study by President Lavigne was being investigated by the European Organization for Molecular Biology (EMBO) and targeted by Elizabeth Beek, a famous academic anti-counterfeit person. three other papers published on Nature and Science were also considered to be "major problems".

You know, Elizabeth Beek, similar to Sherlock Holmes in the academic anti-counterfeiting circle, is very good at detecting specially processed images in the paper.

In this revelation, a number of research charts suspected of fraud are attached, and the suspicious parts are clearly circled.

At the same time, the article also said that Stanford "played down" Lavigne's alleged academic misconduct in a statement at that time.

Spokesman Dimostofi said Lavigne was "not involved in any form of falsification of the two controversial papers," including those published on EMBO under review. The school says these questions will not affect the data, results or interpretation of the paper.

This kind of argument is obviously not acceptable to the censors. Theo interviewed Elizabeth Beek, a professional academic anti-counterfeiter, and she said that it is obviously inappropriate to disregard it on the grounds that it does not affect the data. people who read the paper may think that there are still many mistakes hidden in the data?

With all kinds of doubts and arguments, this article published in the school magazine quickly attracted the attention of all parties and became the most critical fuse in the whole investigation.

The day after the article was published (November 30), Science announced the correction of two controversial papers; on December 2, Stanford officially set up an investigation team to investigate the relevant papers; and on December 6, Cell also announced an investigation of the relevant papers.

On December 7, the university released a list of members of the investigation team, headed by the former Deputy Secretary of Justice of the United States, followed by Nobel laureate Randy Sheckman and former Princeton University President Shelley Dilman.

Ravigne herself issued a public statement at the time:

The integrity of science is very important to the school and to me personally.

Over the next eight months, the investigation team focused on 12 papers co-authored by Lavigne. The results show that among the 5 papers in which Lavigne is the main author, there are 4 papers with data tampering and conclusions misleading.

Ravigne himself also issued the latest statement, saying that he was a "victim" who trusted his students and his researchers too much, and that he would monitor the experimental work more strictly in the future, such as systematically comparing images with the original data.

On August 31, Ravigne will officially step down as president of Stanford University, but will then stay on to teach.

In this regard, the academic anti-counterfeit person Elizabeth Beek expressed surprise:

I was surprised by his resignation. I think it's a good result.

He should be a better supervisor, as a senior scholar in the research, although he is not an experimenter, he is responsible for the final work.

However, Beek also said that the storm will certainly have a great impact on Lavigne's future research work, and any work may be called into question.

These academic misconduct papers appear at different stages of his research career, so it is not a laboratory problem.

If he writes new papers later, they should be subject to more rigorous and thorough scrutiny.

It is worth mentioning that in this "related paper", there is another study related to Alzheimer's disease.

You know, another "big case" run by Beek, an academic anti-counterfeit man, in July last year was also related to Alzheimer's disease. Science revealed that the important Alzheimer's hypothesis, published on Nature in 2006, was suspected of being falsified. This could mislead the field for as long as 17 years.

Some netizens lamented that the research field of Alzheimer's disease has been a mess for many years, which leads to very few really effective clinical studies.

In addition to the heated discussion about the investigation itself, netizens also noticed the sophomore who lit the fuse, Theo Baker. It is understood that he entered school in 2022 and is very interested in news reporting, computer and other fields.

Some people say that his parents are both in the news industry, and they are senior journalists for the New York Times and the New Yorker.

In any case, President Lavigne has been caught up in a wave of investigations that have stunned everyone in the academic community. Professor Chen Yiran of Duke University also came to eat melons and revealed the next "strong competitor"....

Perhaps this is the highest state of cheating mentors? (doge)

Reference link:

[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resigns-over-manipulated-research-will-retract-at-least-3-papers/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36790301/

[3] https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/message-stanford-community/

[4] https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/29/stanford-presidents-research-under-investigation-for-scientific-misconduct-university-admits-mistakes/

[5] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/tessier-lavigne-matter-shows-why-running-lab-full-time-job

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