Following months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday he will resign as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in the studies he oversaw in recent decades.
The analysisconducted by an external panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claims involving the work of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne — whose 2009 landmark Alzheimer’s study was the subject of an investigation that found falsified data and covered it up by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne.
The panel concluded that the claims “appear to be erroneous” and that there was no evidence of falsified data or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was involved in fraud.
But the review also noted that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had “numerous problems” and “fell below standard standards of scientific rigor and process,” especially for a potentially important paper.
As a result of the examination, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne is expected to request a major correction to the 2009 paper, published in Nature, as well as another study in Nature. He also said he would request the retraction of a 1999 paper that appeared in the journal Cell and two others that appeared in Science in 2001.
Stanford is known for its leadership in scientific research, and even the claims involve work published before Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at the university in 2016, the accusations reflect poorly on the university’s integrity.
In a statement describing his reasons for resigning, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, “I hope that there may be an ongoing discussion about the report and its conclusions, at least in the near term, which may lead to a debate about my ability to lead the university in the new academic year.”
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne will step down as president at the end of August but will remain at the university as a tenured professor of biology. As president, he started the university’s first new school in 70 years, the climate-focused Doerr School of Sustainability. A renowned neuroscientist, he published more than 220 papers, mainly on the cause and treatment of degenerative brain diseases.
The university named Richard Saller, a professor of European studies, as interim president, effective Sept. 1.
The Stanford panel’s 89-page report, based on more than 50 interviews and a review of more than 50,000 documents, concluded that members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne engaged in inappropriate manipulation of research data or deficient scientific skills, resulting in significant flaws in the five papers that listed Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as lead author.
In several instances, the panel found, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne took inadequate steps to correct the errors, and it questioned her decision not to seek a correction to the 2009 paper after follow-up studies revealed that its main finding was wrong.
The flaws cited by the panel involved a total of 12 papers, including seven in which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne is listed as a co-author.
The accusations against Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, 63, first appeared years ago on PubPeer, an online crowdsourcing site for publishing and discussing scientific work.
But they resurfaced after the student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, published a series of articles questioning the work done in laboratories overseen by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne. In November, The Stanford Daily reported claims whose images were manipulated in published papers listing Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as either lead author or co-author.
In February, The Stanford Daily published more serious claims of fraud involving a 2009 paper published by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne while a senior scientist at Genentech. It said a Genentech investigation found the study contained falsified data, and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne tried to keep its findings hidden.
It also said a postdoctoral researcher who worked on the study was caught by Genentech falsifying data. Both Dr. Tessier-Lavigne and the former researcher, now a medical doctor practicing in Florida, strongly denied the claims, relying heavily on unnamed sources.
The review panel said The Stanford Daily’s claim that “Genentech conducted a fraud investigation and found fraud” in the study “appears to be erroneous.” No such investigation was conducted, the report said, but it noted that the panel was unable to identify several unnamed sources cited in the story.
Kaushikee Nayudu, the editor-in-chief and president of The Stanford Daily, said in a statement Wednesday that the newspaper stood by its reporting.
In response to the newspaper’s initial report about the manipulated studies in November, Stanford’s board of trustees formed a special committee to review the claims, chaired by Carol Lam, a Stanford trustee and former federal prosecutor. The special committee then contacted Mark Filip, a former federal judge in Illinois, and his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, to run the review.
In January, it was announced that Mr. Filip had enlisted a five-member scientific panel – which included a Nobel laureate and a former Princeton president – to examine the claims from a scientific perspective.
Genentech considered the 2009 study a breakthrough, with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne recognized the findings in a presentation to Genentech investors as a completely new and different way of looking at the Alzheimer’s disease process.
The study focused on what it said was the previously unknown role of a protein in the brain – Death Receptor 6 – in the development of Alzheimer’s.
As with many new Alzheimer’s theories, a major finding of the study was found to be incorrect. After several years of attempts to duplicate the results, Genentech ultimately abandoned the line of inquiry.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne left Genentech in 2011 to head Rockefeller University, but, with the company, published subsequent work acknowledging the failure to confirm key parts of the research.
Recently, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne told the industry publication Stat News that there were inconsistencies in the results of the experiments, which she blamed on contaminated protein samples.
His laboratory’s failure to ensure the purity of the samples was one of the problems with the scientific process cited by the panel, although it found that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne those problems at the time. It called the decision of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne not to correct the original paper as “suboptimal” but within the bounds of scientific practice.
In his statement, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said he previously tried to issue corrections to the Cell and Science papers but Cell refused to publish a correction and Science failed to publish one after agreeing to do so.
The panel’s findings echo a report released in April by Genentech, which said its own internal review of The Stanford Daily’s statements found no evidence of “fraud, fabrication, or other intentional wrongdoing.”
Much of the Stanford panel’s report is a detailed appendix that analyzes images in 12 published papers on which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne as author or co-author, some dating back 20 years.
In the papers, the panel found numerous instances of images being duplicated or spliced together but concluded that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not participate in the manipulations, was not aware of them at the time, and was not reckless in failing to see them.
Dr. Matthew Schrag, an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University who in February flagged problems with the 2009 Alzheimer’s study, said the publication of the study illustrates how scientific journals sometimes give prominent researchers the benefit of the doubt while reviewing their studies.
For senior scientists running busy labs, Dr. Schrag, it can be difficult to review every piece of data produced by the more junior researchers they supervise. But, he said, “I think the accumulation of problems is increasing to a level that requires some oversight.”
Dr. Schrag, emphasizing that he was speaking for himself and not Vanderbilt, said the resignation of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne makes sense, as does the rest of his faculty. He noted that many of the findings of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne has proven and helped solve critical mysteries of neuroscience.
“I have some mixed feelings about the heat he’s bringing, because I think he’s probably not the main player to blame here,” said Dr. Schrag. “I think he had a responsibility to do more than he probably did, but that also doesn’t mean he wasn’t trying to do the right thing.”
Oliver Whang, Benjamin Mueller and Katie Robertson contributed reporting.