Stanford president was exposed for academic misconduct and is under investigation by the school! 11 papers suspected of "tampering with images"

Is Stanford University investigating its president for academic misconduct?

Recently, Stanford University announced a formal investigation into neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of the school, due to suspicion of "tampering with images."

Stanford University officials said in a statement: "The school will begin to evaluate the reported information and will take the same steps as it does when investigating other allegations of academic misconduct. , operate with the same strictness."

In this regard, Tessier-Lavigne said: "Scientific integrity is the most important to the school and me personally, and I will fully cooperate with this investigation. .》

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Article address: ​https://www.science.org/content/article/stanford-investigates-potential -misconduct-president-s-research​

The papers reviewed include two Science papers from 2001, one Nature paper from 2003, and one from 2008 EMBO Journal (Journal of the European Society for Molecular Biology) paper, and a 1999 Cell paper. However, these articles were published before he came to Stanford.

Paper address: https://www.science. org/doi/10.1126/science.1058445​

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Paper address: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1059391​

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Paper address: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01784​

Paper address: https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/emboj.2008.86

Paper address: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(00)80804-1

At first , while Stanford acknowledged there were problems in the papers, it downplayed Tessier-Lavigne's role in the potential misconduct in a statement:

At the time, spokesperson Dee Mostofi said the errors Either it does not involve Tessier-Lavigne or it "does not affect the interpretation of the data, results, or paper."

######However, as the incident gradually unfolded, Stanford later changed its tune and stated that the school would conduct an investigation overseen by the school's board of trustees. ######### Questions were raised 7 years ago ######### On PubPeer, scientists often comment anonymously on possible problems with published research. have a discussion. ######

The "image error" that appeared in Tessier-Lavigne's paper also appeared for the first time on this website.

Some of these posts noted that various Western blots documenting the presence of proteins were repeated in more than one image or had been modified.

Of course, without conclusive evidence, these problems do not necessarily mean that the author has committed academic misconduct, and may just be unintentional mistakes.

However, the number seems to be slightly more, a total of 11 articles...

##" As the third author of the EMBO paper, President Tessier-Lavigne is included solely to recognize his contribution in providing necessary reagents for other authors' research," Stanford said.

Co-authorship usually means more direct involvement. Yale University's academic guidelines, for example, state that co-authors of academic publications should be "directly involved...in writing drafts of the article" and must "review and confirm the manuscript before it is submitted for publication."

It seems that just providing the reagent and naming the author seems a bit unqualified.

Interestingly, Tessier-Lavigne, who was still working at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), reported to Cell as early as 2015 Errors in the paper that the editor of the journal deem unnecessary to correct.

The editor-in-chief of Science, Holden Thorp, recently admitted that Tessier-Lavigne had submitted corrections to two papers in Science magazine in October 2015, but "because of an error," Science These corrections have not been published.

In a statement, Thorp expressed his "apology" to the academic community: "We regret this error and will share our next steps related to these two papers as soon as possible. ."

Rare: Top journal publicly admits that it is "under investigation"

EMBO journal wrote in a public article last week that it is investigating a 2008 article Allegations of the paper on receptors in the brain.

In fact, it is rare for academic journals to openly acknowledge such surveys. EMBO is frequently ranked as the top journal in the field by Scimago journal rankings and receives nearly 3,000 submissions each year. The journal has retracted papers based on PubPeer allegations in the past, but did not acknowledge an ongoing investigation before retracting.

This indicates that the public announcement of this news may mean that the investigation has been ongoing for some time.

It is unclear how long the investigation will take, and even if the final result shows that Tessier-Lavigne did not commit academic misconduct, the investigation itself will have serious consequences for him.

In the past, well-known German researcher Silvia Bulfon-Paus was found to have tampered with images in several papers in 2011 (Bulfon-Paus blamed two of her postdoctoral fellows staff) and was later forced to resign as director of the Borstel Institute.

Ohio State University professor Carlo Croce was dogged by similar accusations in 2017. Earlier this year, an official investigation by the school found that he himself had not doctored the images, but he was later disciplined due to "management issues" and two of his researchers were identified as fakers and fired.

2019 Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza retracted 17 papers after accusations were made on PubPeer.

Currently, Tessier-Lavigne’s papers confirmed by Stanford University as “problematic” have been downloaded tens of thousands of times, including some of his most cited work in neurobiology. None of these papers have been retracted or corrected.

Tessier-Lavigne's work in the 1990s first identified the molecules needed to guide axons, opening up a new field of research.

Before taking over as president of Stanford University in early 2016, Tessier-Lavigne mentored more than 1,000 scientists at biotech companies Genentech and Regeneron.

In 2014, Tessier-Lavigne’s annual salary at Regeneron was more than $1.5 million. In 2021, he served as president of Stanford and as a director of Regeneron’s board of directors, he also received an annual salary of $700,000.

Some experts say that scientific journals and institutions have historically been unwilling to investigate alleged academic misconduct, especially the behavior of powerful scientists. Even when journals respond, investigations are slow, bureaucratic and often completely confidential, according to several researchers familiar with the retraction process.

Pictures frequently show signs of tampering: mirroring, copying, rotating, shifting...

In the eyes of biologist and scientific misconduct investigator Elisabeth Bik It turns out that the pictures in the paper investigated by EMBO show signs of deliberate manipulation and will mislead readers.

As a veteran who has observed academic misconduct for many years, Bik has rich experience. He has investigated more than 20,000 papers in the past, of which nearly 1,000 were retracted, and roughly the same number of papers were corrected. , can be called the "anti-counterfeiting expert" in the American biological academic community.

Bik said the problems she observed in EMBO papers varied in complexity. For example, one plate in a diagram appears to be copied directly and completely from another plate. This is what she calls a "Type 1 error": usually the most common typesetting error, or an accidental mistake when stitching together pictures.

You can see two sets of traces of repeated use (taken from the EMBO paper, 2008)

But other picture problems are more complicated. For example, in the picture below, Bik said that a gel band in the color box in the picture seems to be the result of direct "copy flipping". She said this duplication within the same section may have been an attempt to dispel suspicions that the images were manipulated.

A gel band appears to be mirrored, flipped and reused in the same image (excerpt from EMBO paper, 2008)

In another paper published in Science in 2003, Tessier-Lavigne was listed as the fourth of 14 authors. The article contained a series of articles described as Pictures that are different from each other. But according to Bik, they actually look like the same image, just rotated.

"This spin may have misleading intent," Bik said.

The pictures that are supposed to represent different experimental results seem to be rotations of the same picture and are used repeatedly (taken from the Nature paper , 2003)

As for the pictures in the 2001 Science paper, there were several unexplained shifts and duplications, which seemed to highlight more Deliberately doing good (or masking worse) experimental results.

The texture details in several places seem to have been modified (taken from Science, 2001)

Bik believes that this may be It is a way to avoid certain undesirable consequences.

The blots in Figures B and D were obtained by copying (taken from Science , 2001)

In this regard, some scholars pointed out that original data are often discarded by researchers, especially those papers published a long time ago.

It can be said that it is an almost impossible task to compare the possibly tampered images with the original images many years later and use them to determine the ownership of the responsibility.

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