After we first went to Dr. Tessier-Lavigne with questions within the fall, a Stanford spokeswoman responded as a substitute, claiming the issues raised about three of his publications “don’t have an effect on the info, outcomes or interpretation of the papers.” However because the Stanford-sponsored investigation discovered and he ultimately got here to agree, that was not true.
Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s plan to retract or problem strong corrections for at the very least 5 papers for which he was a principal creator is a uncommon act for a scientist of his stature. It appears unlikely this could have occurred with out the general public stress of the previous eight months; in truth, the report concluded that “at varied occasions when issues with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers emerged — in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-16 and March 2021 — Dr. Tessier-Lavigne didn’t decisively and forthrightly appropriate errors within the scientific document.”
The Stanford investigation didn’t discover that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne personally altered knowledge or pasted items of experimental photos collectively. As an alternative, it discovered that he had presided over a lab tradition that “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that’s, postdocs who might generate favorable outcomes) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that’s, postdocs who had been unable or struggled to generate such knowledge).” In an announcement, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne stated, “I can state categorically that I didn’t want this dynamic. I’ve all the time handled all of the scientists in my lab with the utmost respect, and I’ve endeavored to make sure that all members flourish as profitable scientists.”
Winner-takes-all stakes are, sadly, an all-too-common prevalence in tutorial science, with postdoctoral researchers usually topic to the extraordinary stress of the necessity to publish or perish. Having a paper along with your identify on it in Nature, Science or Cell, the high-profile journals by which most of the papers reviewed by the Stanford investigation appeared, could make or break younger careers. Postdocs are underpaid; Stanford not too long ago bought housing that was meant to be reasonably priced for them, then reportedly set minimal wage necessities for dwelling there increased than their wages. They’re additionally jockeying to face out in a discipline with restricted lab positions and professorship openings. And senior researchers generally take credit score for his or her postdocs’ work and concepts however brush off duty ought to errors or errors come up.
What isn’t widespread, in fact, is the “frequency of manipulation of analysis knowledge and/or substandard scientific practices” within the labs Dr. Tessier-Lavigne ran, the Stanford report concluded. Falsification, the technical time period for a lot of this conduct, entails “violating elementary analysis requirements and primary societal values,” in line with the Nationwide Academy of Sciences. In his assertion, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne stated that he has “all the time sought to mannequin the best values of the occupation, each by way of rigor and of integrity, and I’ve labored diligently to advertise a optimistic tradition in my lab.” Regardless of the report’s characterization of what went on in his labs as uncommon and irregular, classes from this case apply throughout the sector, particularly concerning the significance of correcting the scientific document.
