Stanford College president Marc Tessier-Lavigne was previously govt vp for analysis and chief scientific officer at biotech big Genentech, based on his web page on Wikipedia. “In 2022, Stanford College opened an investigation into allegations of Tessier-Lavigne’s involvement in fabricating outcomes in articles revealed between 2001 and 2008.”
However Friday Stanford’s pupil newspaper revealed much more allegations:
In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a prime govt on the biotechnology firm Genentech, was the first writer of a scientific paper revealed within the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have discovered the potential trigger for mind degeneration in Alzheimer’s sufferers. “Due to this analysis,” learn Genentech’s annual letter to shareholders, “we’re working to develop each antibodies and small molecules that will assault Alzheimer’s from a novel entry level and assist the thousands and thousands of people that at present undergo from this devastating illness.”
However after a number of unsuccessful makes an attempt to breed the analysis, the paper turned the topic of an inside evaluate by Genentech’s Analysis Evaluate Committee (RRC), based on 4 high-level Genentech workers on the time… The scientists, one in all whom was an govt who sat on the evaluate committee and all of whom have been knowledgeable of the evaluate’s findings on the time as a result of their stature on the firm, stated that the inquiry found falsification of information within the analysis, and that Tessier-Lavigne saved the discovering from changing into public.
Tessier-Lavigne denies each allegations. Genentech stated in a press release that “as a part of our diligence associated to those allegations, we reviewed the data from that November 2011 RRC assembly and noticed no allegations of fraud or wrongdoing.” The corporate acknowledged that “provided that these occasions occurred a few years in the past … our present data is probably not full.”
After the evaluate, which started in 2011, Genentech canceled analysis primarily based on the paper’s findings. Until Maurer, a senior scientist on the firm from 2009-2018 who stated he was assigned to develop medicine primarily based on the 2009 paper, instructed The Every day that his superior knowledgeable him that, in Maurer’s phrases, “the challenge is being canceled and it is as a result of they discovered falsified knowledge….”
In keeping with the chief who was a part of the committee that reviewed the paper, the inquiry was thorough and left little room for doubt. Laboratory technicians and assistants have been interviewed whereas scientists impartial of the lab tried to confirm the findings of the examine. “None of [the research review committee members] believed that these knowledge have been true by the point folks had tried to breed it,” the chief stated. He stated that the understanding of the analysis committee was that the paper’s supposed discovering of N-APP’s function in Alzheimer’s had been “faked,” and used “made up” figures as proof.
