Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify that the Stanford Special Committee investigation concluded that Marc Tessier-Lavigne had not conducted fraudulent scientific research, and that the manipulation of data in the retracted papers he co-authored was done without his knowledge. We also have included additional factual context based on new information we received post-publication.
Not long after he arrived on the Stanford University campus in 2022 as a 17-year-old freshman, Theo Baker received a tip about the school’s president, the neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker, the son of two prominent Washington, D.C., journalists, had joined the staff of The Stanford Daily and was looking for a story he could dig into. And here it was: On a website called PubPeer, a forum for discussing scientific papers, critics were claiming that papers coming out of Tessier-Lavigne’s lab contained manipulated data. And, according to posts on the site, it had been going on for years.
Tessier-Lavigne has focused much of his career on searching for the key that might unlock Alzheimer’s, a disease that has long frustrated scientists. Prior to becoming a university president—he headed The Rockefeller University before taking the Stanford post in 2016—Tessier-Lavigne oversaw Genentech’s huge 1,400-person laboratory. His private sector work had made him wealthy, and, in the world of Alzheimer’s science, famous. He had co-authored several papers that were considered pathbreaking, including a 2009 paper published while he was at Genentech. The paper had four authors, but as the lab leader, Tessier-Lavigne was listed as the “principal investigator,” or PI. Calling the research a “significant breakthrough,” he boasted that it could “turn our understanding of Alzheimer’s upside down.”
Over the next decade-plus, that paper, which had been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, was cited 816 times by other researchers. A Duke University neurologist excitedly told Nature, “We have yet to get a disease-modifying drug that works. So we’re missing something, and maybe this is one of the missing pieces.” Genentech devoted substantial resources to “develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer’s” based on the Tessier-Lavigne findings.
Except that, as Baker was discovering, the supposed breakthrough was nothing of the sort. Scientists both inside and outside the company had difficulty replicating one key element of the paper. At least one top Genentech executive believed the problem was serious enough that Tessier-Lavigne should retract the paper, according to a later investigation by Genentech. By 2012, a year after Tessier-Lavigne left the company, Genentech quietly abandoned its research effort based on the 2009 paper.
