Science Corrects Itself, Right? A Scandal at Stanford Says It Doesn’t
What does it take to correct the scientific record? And who—and what—stands in the way? The answer to both questions is: everyone
By Ivan Oransky, Adam Marcus on August 1, 2023
A general view of the campus of Stanford University, including Hoover Tower, as seen from Stanford Stadium, Palo Alto, California. Credit: David Madison/Getty Images
By now you may have heard about the resignation of Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne. The move came last month after a report by a special committee of the university’s Board of Trustees found Tessier-Lavigne had, among other things, “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record” on at least four different occasions.
You may have thought, given the voluminous coverage of this case, that Tessier-Lavigne’s defenestration demonstrates such failures are highly unusual and typically lead to significant sanctions.
Neither is true. If—and given the history of such episodes, that’s a big if—journals end up retracting the three papers Tessier-Lavigne has said he has agreed to retract (two in Science and one in Cell), the number will represent less than a tenth of a percent of the retractions we expect to see this year. We at Retraction Watch, which tracks retracted papers, estimate that figure to be about 5,000—a tiny fraction of how many retractions should happen but don’t. And the careers of most researchers whose names are on the retractions that do happen haven’t suffered a scratch. The ones whose papers haven’t been retracted have even fewer worries.
From a distance, using history-erasing rose-colored glasses, it is reasonable to place the blame squarely on Tessier-Lavigne for the fact that his now disgraced work remained in the scientific record without any flags. After all, as the investigative committee noted in its report, problems with the research surfaced “in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-16, and March 2021.”
In 2001, the committee wrote, Tessier-Lavigne told a colleague who brought issues to his attention “in writing that he would take corrective action, including both contacting the journal and attempting to issue a correction.” He did not.
Things went differently in 2015 and 2016 after the appearance of comments about the papers on PubPeer, a forum for discussions about the validity of scientific papers. “Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did an able job of initially pursuing corrective efforts with the journals Cell and Science between 2015-16, despite the uncooperativeness of another co-author during this time,” the committee wrote. But Cell determined a correction wasn’t necessary, and Science said it would publish Tessier-Lavigne’s corrections—and then didn’t.
