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.”
It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that a guy like this can build an entire career on fraudulent research in his lab and then rise to the role of president of Stanford. This guy is 63 and the first concerns over his paper emerged in 2001. And after all this they let him keep his position as a professor.
Edit: I need to clarify that the fraudulent research was taking place in his lab but the allegations do not include him directly falsifying the research. The papers in question had his name on them and he failed to set the record straight when suspicions about their validity arose, even though it was his responsibility
First … I’m totally with you.
Second, the correction, which is a terribly bitter pill to swallow, is that it is precisely this kind of person that would get to such a position, and it’s a problem. The world over, Douglas Adams’s paradox of democracy, that the type of person who seeks to be elected is by that very decision the kind of person you don’t want to be elected, is basically at play everywhere, and we’re not doing a good job of correcting for this bias/paradox across the board.
If you’re not familiar with academic science and research, let me tell you that it gets incredibly political and feudal pretty quickly. Many people find academia, however high a view you might have of science and academia, a toxic place to be. I, for one, am not surprised at all and would bet that looking into any high academic office you’d find all sorts of dodgy things (though many less than outright fraud) all over the place.