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.”
  • diamat@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    182·
    1 year ago

    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

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
      241·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • bmaxv@noc.social
      24·
      1 year ago

      @diamat this is only surprising if you approach #academia and #science with a positive bias instead of objectivity.

      I have not seen an actually convincing quality control or publishing standard.

      It’s all undocumented, learned behavior that gets approved or denied through unelected councils.

      At least it’s not e.g. students or readers of papers who do the voting.

      Not saying there aren’t good people doing good things. But the thing as a whole is incredibly and obviously shady.

  • DozensOfDonner@mander.xyzEnglish
    615·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • maxcorbetti@lemmy.mlEnglish
      91·
      1 year ago

      He directly pressured his researchers to produce “correct” results (to whatever the extent of “rewards” means).

      • DozensOfDonner@mander.xyzEnglish
        213·
        1 year ago

        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

    • diamat@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • DozensOfDonner@mander.xyzEnglish
        213·
        1 year ago

        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).