Trust in scientific institutions is as crucial as research itself.
When Stanford's president, Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, announced his resignation in July, even those who had been following his case were surprised. Despite the terrific work that the student journalist Theo Baker had published at The Stanford Daily, connecting the dots between examples of manipulated research turning up in multiple papers on which Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author, it wasn't easy to imagine the president of such a prestigious university voluntarily giving up his job with so much at stake. |
But it's also hard to imagine the scientist president of an Ivy-plus university hanging on to his role while at the same time blatantly fabricated images of experiments remain uncorrected and unretracted in his published papers in Cell, Nature and Science. In the face of mounting pressure, that contradiction was ultimately too much to sustain. Baker explores the scandal and its implications in a searching guest essay published on Sunday. |
Tessier-Lavigne has had a brilliant career, most notably in pioneering significant research that helped show the molecular mechanisms that cause axons — the thin branch of a nerve cell or neuron that transmits electrical impulses — to grow in a guided manner that properly wires together the nervous system. |
But I'm struck by the thought that years from now, his most lasting contribution to science may be his resignation as president of Stanford University, both as an example of the serious consequences of failing to maintain research integrity in the lab and as an affirmation that, in scientific research, the buck stops with the principal authors. Brain development is an important topic, but its importance is dwarfed by the mile-high stakes of overall scientific integrity and the mission of ensuring that fabricated experimental evidence has no place in published science. |
Baker, who was 17 when he first started publishing these stories, has been performing a high-wire act with his reporting: publicly pointing a finger at the powerful man who leads his university while at the same time being cautious, careful and fair-minded in his analysis and framing of the situation, and always keeping an eye on the bigger picture of why this story matters. |
It's that last topic that we asked Theo to explore in his guest essay: why journals and lab scientists ought to take a hard look at the details of the saga of Tessier-Lavigne, and how taking research misconduct more seriously can build trust between scientific institutions and society. |
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