On the 19th local time in the United States, Mark Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford University, announced that he would resign as president and officially resigned on August 31. The decision came after a special committee at the university released the findings of a review into its academic misconduct.
Tessier-Lavigne on the Stanford campus
Tessier-Lavigne was born in Canada and studied in Europe for a long time. After coming to the United States, he successively served as the president of Rockefeller University and Stanford University, and left a strong record in governance at these two well-known universities. In the field of neuromedicine, he was once called an "epoch-making pioneer" by the New York Times. He was famous for his research on the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease (that is, Alzheimer's disease), but these researches also paved the way for his current "discredit".
However, Tessier-Lavigne himself firmly denied that he had intentionally falsified the experimental data. According to his own statement, he resigned from the post of principal only to "take care of the reputation of the school".
resigned as principal, denies deliberate falsification
Last year, on the PubPeer platform commonly used by scientists, someone published a series of posts accusing Tessier-Lavigne of Alzheimer's disease research that he participated in. The alleged studies were conducted while he was executive vice president of drug development at Genentech, an American biotechnology company. At the time, Tessier-Lavigne was credited with discovering patterns in brain scans that first revealed the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease. As a result, Tessier-Lavigne served as an advisor to the scientific council of the "Alzheimer's Disease Cure Foundation" in the United States, and entered the American academic circle, serving as the principal of two schools with the strongest biomedical technology strength. The doubts on the
PubPeer platform have intensified, and the Stanford University journal "Stanford Daily" also published a series of investigative reports, doubting the authenticity of Tessier-Lavigne's research. "Stanford Daily" anonymously interviewed 4 senior executives and scientists inside Genentech and found that since Tessier-Lavigne's research conclusions have not been reproduced in repeated experiments since then, Genentech has also re-investigated the research projects of the year. These reports have caused an uproar in American college circles, and Tessier-Lavigne's reputation accumulated in his academic career is facing the danger of "collapse".
Last December, under strong calls, the Stanford University Board of Trustees ordered an independent review of 12 Tessier-Lavigne research papers over the past 20 years. The special committee was led by a former federal judge and five scientists. On the 19th local time, the results of the review announced by the special committee showed that Tessier-Lavigne was not involved in the most serious allegation of data falsification. However, the special committee pointed out that the five papers of which he was the main author had serious flaws in the research data, and four of them had very obvious data manipulation and falsification problems. Although he himself was not directly involved in the falsification, Tessier-Lavigne did not humbly accept the suggestion for verification and review when faced with doubts from others, and he was responsible for negligence.
Tessier-Lavigne said that although he was not aware of the falsification of the data, he would take responsibility for it and would withdraw three papers and correct two others. He wrote in an open letter to the faculty and students of the university, "As I have emphasized, I have always believed in the accuracy of the data before submitting scientific papers. The report of the special committee confirms my statement. I agree that in some cases, I should have tried harder to correct the wrongdoing of my staff, but unfortunately I did not. - Lavigne also said that his decision to resign was considered from the perspective of "the overall reputation of the school" and did not mean that he "has a guilty conscience."
Jerry Yang, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Stanford University, posted on the school's website that he accepted Tessier-Lavigne's resignation and confirmed that he will continue to serve as a tenured professor in the Department of Biology. The board also formed a committee to begin the selection process for the next headteacher, while appointing Richard Thaller as interim headteacher from 1 September.
Tessier-Lavigne's Inauguration Ceremony as President of Stanford University Scientists have spent many years trying to overcome this intractable disease, but the results have been slow.
In February 2009, Tessier-Lavigne, then executive vice president of Genentech, and some lab members published a paper claiming to have located a specific protein that caused the onset of Alzheimer's disease. That means if the lab can figure out how to inhibit the protein's growth, millions of Alzheimer's patients in the U.S. could be born again, and Genentech could discover a surprisingly lucrative pharmaceutical market. Tessier-Lavigne's presentation of the research stunned the company, recalls a senior scientist at
. "I don't know where these discoveries came from," said a scientist. Another executive who was in the room at the time said, “We were all thinking, oh my god, this is a Nobel Prize-worthy work, what a miracle.” Nobel laureate Paul Greengard called it "a very exciting paper" and said "it will have a major impact on the field of Alzheimer's disease research." The journal Nature News published an article titled "Alzheimer's disease theory makes a splash," detailing Tessier-Lavigne and his team to scientists. The
paper has been cited a total of 1245 times, which can be called "top class" in the field of neuromedicine, and most papers in this field will not be cited more than 10 times. Shortly after the
paper was published, Tessier-Lavigne filed a 187-page patent with the World Intellectual Property Organization entitled "Methods for Inhibiting Neuroticism." On the same day, they also filed patent applications in the United States, Brazil, Israel, Canada and Australia, hoping to use their research results to develop drugs and obtain monopoly profits.
But this research failed to translate into a treatment for Alzheimer's disease, and several countries, including the United States, terminated the patent after internal reviews.
Til Morell, a senior scientist who was in charge of developing drugs based on the study at the time, recalled that after the paper was published, he was "invited to meet with the star scientists at Genentech." Morell's superiors told him that the Tessier-Lavigne team had discovered "a very specific protein that is implicated in Alzheimer's disease," and the company immediately launched a drug program around it. However, because in subsequent experiments, the research and development team was unable to locate this "special protein" according to the method of Tessier-Lavigne's paper, the related drug research and development project was forced to stop, and the team members were reassigned to other tasks.
Canada-born, European-schooled, recognized in the US
Tésier-Lavigne was born in Toronto, Canada, and grew up primarily in London and Brussels. His father served in the Canadian Army and was sent overseas with NATO troops. He earned a degree in physics at McGill University, then was a Rhodes Scholar while studying at Oxford University. He recalls: "I fell in love with neurology when I first encountered it at Oxford."
Tessier-Lavigne received a Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of London. During this period, he specialized in the study of how the human brain develops, which laid the foundation for his future research on Alzheimer's disease. After graduating from the UK, he immigrated to the United States and taught at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University. After his dissertation on Alzheimer's disease became famous, he was poached by Rockefeller University in New York to serve as president. Rockefeller University is the famous "Nobel Physiology Prize Cradle" in the United States. This was the first time that the school recruited a president from an industrial company. Tessier-Lavigne's reputation also reached its peak at that time. The New York Times wrote that his job-hopping "has created a precedent and is of epoch-making significance."
On February 4, 2016, Stanford University announced that Tessier-Lavigne will succeed John L. Hennessy became the 11th president of the school. In November 2020, he was awarded the Order of Canada, "in recognition of his pioneering contributions to neuroscience, as well as his world-renowned leadership and strong advocacy for science", which is also one of Canada's highest national honors.
According to the official website of Stanford University, during his tenure as president, Tessier-Lavigne brainstormed and adopted as many as 2,800 suggestions from the school's community groups, and launched a project involving scientific research, teaching and campus construction. According to reports, this reform aims to enable Stanford University to face the competition and challenges of the 21st century and keep pace with the times at the "juncture of urgency and pressure". At the same time, he is also actively involved in science popularization work, and also participated in supporting the development of many start-up medical companies and laboratories. During his tenure as president, he still did not give up his teaching and scientific research work, and continued to pay attention to the research progress of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. 2
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