Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug. 31. He will also retract or issue lengthy corrections to five widely cited papers for which he was principal author after a Stanford-sponsored investigation found “manipulation of research data.”
Worth noting that, according to the report from Stanfords commitee investigating this, he wasn’t the primary person working on the data and was assumed not to know about the actual data manipulation.
That’s not to say it’s pretty bad that he didn’t raise concerns himself when reviewing whatever he puts his name on (or taking 20 years for such allegations to take good), but he didn’t blatantly make up data himself and denied it. Still dumb, yes, but I wouldn’t crucify him yet. Maybe just give him a few hard bitch slaps or something.
Every time that concerns over the papers came up he decisively failed to correct the record and he defended the papers. As the head of his lab he was also responsible for the culture that enabled this kind of fraudulent research.
Yeah that’s a red flag, he’s definitely responsible. I’m curious how the person who actually did the manipulation came to his decision. Do you know some source about the culture in his lab? Would be interesting to read some anonymous source or something. Lot of land I know of have a near-toxic success culture but not immediately going towards fraud (more like pushing people to a burnout).
He directly pressured his researchers to produce “correct” results (to whatever the extent of “rewards” means).
Ah, didn’t see that. Granted, I just went through the report quickly. I don’t want to go “everything-ducks” too fast, but yeah… wrong timeline for that I suppose