Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned earlier this year after an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a paper from Nature. The journal’s editorial office marked another of Tessier-Lavigne’s articles with an expression of concern.
The two Nature papers – which have together been cited more than 1,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – were among five the university investigation examined on which Tessier-Lavigne was the principal author. The other three have been retracted – two from Science and one from Cell. In a statement posted to his lab website July 19, Tessier-Lavigne wrote that he planned to correct the two papers in Nature.
The retracted article, “APP binds DR6 to trigger axon pruning and neuron death via distinct caspases,” appeared in 2009. It has been cited 816 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The retraction notice stated:
The authors have retracted this article. Our subsequent work confirmed aspects of the article, notably that DR6 and APP interact and function in a genetic pathway involving caspases to control axon pruning and neuron death. However, our later research also showed that certain conclusions reached in the article were incorrect, notably the role of caspase-3, the necessity for beta-secretase enzyme activity for APP-DR6 binding, and the model for the APP-DR6 interaction.
More recently, the following anomalies were identified:
Figure 1d: the NGF-deprived +IgG panel appears to be identical to the NGF-deprived, 24h + Control IgG panel of Figure 5e.
Supplementary information Figure 9c: the NGF-deprived + Bax inhibitor control panel appears to be identical to the + anti-NGF control panel of Supplementary information Figure 17c.
Supplementary information Figure 6d: the fourth beta-Actin blot for Casp-3 siRNA appears to be identical to the first beta-Actin blot for Casp-6 siRNA.
Certain biostatistical calculations underlying some figures contained errors.
We believe that these additional anomalies do not affect the conclusions presented in the affected figures. However, given the lack of original data for several of these figures due to the age of the paper, and since our subsequent research showed that certain specific claims in the original article were not correct and we reported a correction for those claims elsewhere, we consider that the appropriate course of action is to retract the article. All the authors agree with this retraction.
The listed “anomalies” refer to images PubPeer users raised concerns about in February and March of this year.
Tessier-Lavigne did not immediately respond to our request for comment. In his statement from July, he wrote:
Importantly, the Panel found that allegations of fraud regarding this paper are “not accurate.”
That said, while most aspects of this paper have withstood the test of time, a number of its key findings required revision, which we addressed through subsequent publications. In addition, multiple anomalies in the paper have come to light in the past several months, and the investigation has uncovered certain inconsistent experimental results prior to publication. It is important to emphasize that I informed the Panel that I was unaware of these new issues prior to publication, and the Panel found no evidence to suggest otherwise. The Panel also found that the approach of publishing follow-on papers was “within the boundaries of normal scientific practice,” but that it was “suboptimal” not to additionally retract or directly correct the paper.
I agree with the Panel that it is important to issue a robust correction in Nature both to address the recently discovered anomalies and to explicitly spell out the revisions to certain key findings in the paper that we presented in subsequent papers but that would not necessarily be apparent to all readers of the Nature paper. I intend to issue such a correction as soon as possible.
The article that now bears an expression of concern, “The netrin receptor UNC5B mediates guidance events controlling morphogenesis of the vascular system,” appeared in 2004. It has been cited 402 times.
The notice stated that Nature was publishing the expression of concern:
to alert the readership that image integrity issues have been raised with some of the data. A report to the Stanford University board concluded that this article reflects evidence of manipulation of research data. We have considered the issues and find that the far-left lanes of the top and bottom panels of Supplementary Figure 2E appear to be duplicated. Given the age of the article there is insufficient information to conclusively assess how the duplication occurred. However, the authors have provided contemporaneous replicates that confirm the validity of the data presented in Supplementary Figure 2E.
Tessier-Lavigne agreed to the journal’s decision, according to the notice. In his July statement, he’d written:
Issues with several figures in this paper were raised last December, which is when I first learned of them. The Panel found no evidence that I knew nor should reasonably have known of these issues. Two of the figures that have been questioned were generated in my laboratory. At least one of them shows evidence of manipulation of research data. Although one of my coauthors located primary data that confirms the result presented in the figure, it nevertheless requires a thorough correction. I am already in touch with the journal about this.
In December 2022, a user on PubPeer posted concerns about the figure called out in the expression of concern.
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The importance of Pubpeer in revealing the research misconducts cannot be denied.
The first author of the retracted 2009 Nature paper,
Anatoly Nikolaev, is second author on this Cell paper, which originates from Columbia University and MIT.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/65ECC6CE97FC8FD6C8139C293F6064
https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2022/03/02/radiation-oncologist-anatoly-nikolaev-md-phd-joins-cleveland-clinic-weston-maroone-cancer-center/
“his PhD thesis in Cancer Biology at Columbia University in New York City.”
Yikes.
The bit where they describe how a trap was set for the fraudster is pure gold.
For anyone wondering about this trap, it’s been descrivend in this article https://stanforddaily.com/2023/03/06/mtl-knew-misconduct-allegations-independently-corroborated-in-private-correspondence-to-special-committee/
“Apparently, they then asked Anatoly [Nikolaev, the first author on the paper,] to repeat a key experiment from the paper himself, but when he did his data seemed too perfect to be true. They then switched the reagents they were giving him to use in the experiment but didn’t tell him — when he came back with the same result again, they knew he was falsifying the data.”
And this was the president of a very prestigious university
Those publications were on his C.V. when he applied for the job, unless Stanford approached him, even then those publications would have been apparent.
And that was a Journal of very high repute. The string of bogus articles published along the years by Nature, in a broad array of fields, speaks volumes on the decay of their scientific and editorial competence. And still people can’t think of anything else than “publishing in Nature”. To me, having “published in Nature” is not any more a reliable indicator of the standing of a researcher.