Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - Printable Version
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RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - 82lsju - 04-23-2024
(04-23-2024, 09:44 AM)BostonCard Wrote: MTL will now lead a new company, Xaira Therapeutics, which had a splashy launch with $1 billion dollars of funding "to transform drug discovery and development with AI"
https://endpts.com/marc-tessier-lavigne-on-leaving-stanford-and-joining-ai-mega-startup-xaira/
Sorry, it is behind a paywall, but this is an interview with MTL about his new job. There was a question in the interview about his time at Stanford (and whether he intends to incorporate any changes in overseeing the research in his new position):
Quote:Dunn: On your time at Stanford, the investigation found no evidence of data manipulation or fraud on your part. But it did criticize your laboratory oversight and management, and you acknowledged there were things you should have done better. What specifically do you plan to do differently at Xaira in terms of supervising science? And why should you be trusted in that type of position?
Tessier-Lavigne: Well, first, I’m obviously here to talk about Xaira. But maybe I can share a few thoughts.
First, I stand by the quality and rigor of my body of research as a whole. I’ve run a research lab for over three decades with 74 papers which I’m a principal author, and a handful of them had issues, as you pointed out. The panel concluded that I didn’t engage in any scientific misconduct, and I could not have reasonably been expected to have known about it.
And in terms of the lessons I take from this, I have run my lab by putting trust in my team. I’ve had exceptional lab members. I trusted that the data they were presenting to me were real and accurate. In general, that trust was entirely merited. But that created a vulnerability that allowed for these issues to arise in a few papers. What I take from that is the importance of also having an appropriate level of skepticism about data that are brought.
Dunn: Are there specific changes you plan to incorporate in overseeing and leading Xaira?
Tessier-Lavigne: Certainly. What this has driven home for me is the importance of having controls in place to ensure that your data that come forward are real and accurate, and not to take that at face value. And it’s certainly a principle that I’ll be applying here.
BC
so he "trusted his team too much" or "it wasn't my fault"....
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - MV72018 - 04-23-2024
(04-23-2024, 09:44 AM)BostonCard Wrote: MTL will now lead a new company, Xaira Therapeutics, which had a splashy launch with $1 billion dollars of funding "to transform drug discovery and development with AI"
https://endpts.com/marc-tessier-lavigne-on-leaving-stanford-and-joining-ai-mega-startup-xaira/
Sorry, it is behind a paywall, but this is an interview with MTL about his new job. There was a question in the interview about his time at Stanford (and whether he intends to incorporate any changes in overseeing the research in his new position):
Quote:Dunn: On your time at Stanford, the investigation found no evidence of data manipulation or fraud on your part. But it did criticize your laboratory oversight and management, and you acknowledged there were things you should have done better. What specifically do you plan to do differently at Xaira in terms of supervising science? And why should you be trusted in that type of position?
Tessier-Lavigne: Well, first, I’m obviously here to talk about Xaira. But maybe I can share a few thoughts.
First, I stand by the quality and rigor of my body of research as a whole. I’ve run a research lab for over three decades with 74 papers which I’m a principal author, and a handful of them had issues, as you pointed out. The panel concluded that I didn’t engage in any scientific misconduct, and I could not have reasonably been expected to have known about it.
And in terms of the lessons I take from this, I have run my lab by putting trust in my team. I’ve had exceptional lab members. I trusted that the data they were presenting to me were real and accurate. In general, that trust was entirely merited. But that created a vulnerability that allowed for these issues to arise in a few papers. What I take from that is the importance of also having an appropriate level of skepticism about data that are brought.
Dunn: Are there specific changes you plan to incorporate in overseeing and leading Xaira?
Tessier-Lavigne: Certainly. What this has driven home for me is the importance of having controls in place to ensure that your data that come forward are real and accurate, and not to take that at face value. And it’s certainly a principle that I’ll be applying here.
BC
That is a vague response. If he didn't realize the "importance of having controls in place to ensure that your data that come forward are real and accurate, and not to take that at face value," that's alarming.
Some forms of research misconduct involve acts of commission, e.g., fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. Others are forms of negligence and involve acts of omission, e,g., failure to scrutinize data provided to one by lab associates, especially if one is the lead author and the manuscript in question is reporting a paradigm-shifting finding.
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - jacket3ree - 04-23-2024
"Drug discovery and development with AI."
Nothing could go wrong with that, right? Am I alone in feeling like we are all living in some cheesy version of Planet of the Apes? I mean our IT guy named the main server HAL when we first got it, but this feels....different. Never thought I'd be writing company policy on how to incorporate robot overlords into our practice, but here I am.
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - TonyLima - 04-23-2024
(04-23-2024, 01:04 PM)jacket3ree Wrote: "Drug discovery and development with AI."
Nothing could go wrong with that, right? Am I alone in feeling like we are all living in some cheesy version of Planet of the Apes? I mean our IT guy named the main server HAL when we first got it, but this feels....different. Never thought I'd be writing company policy on how to incorporate robot overlords into our practice, but here I am.
Esp with him at the helm. Wuhan II anyone?
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - cardcrimson - 04-23-2024
(04-23-2024, 09:01 PM)TonyLima Wrote:(04-23-2024, 01:04 PM)jacket3ree Wrote: "Drug discovery and development with AI."
Nothing could go wrong with that, right? Am I alone in feeling like we are all living in some cheesy version of Planet of the Apes? I mean our IT guy named the main server HAL when we first got it, but this feels....different. Never thought I'd be writing company policy on how to incorporate robot overlords into our practice, but here I am.
Esp with him at the helm. Wuhan II anyone?
Funny, but be careful. Bordering on political commentary that a few years back would have gotten you banned. . . .
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - BostonCard - 04-24-2024
Relax, on the very day that the MTL-backed announcement came out, another AI enabled drug developer, benevolent AI, announced it was cutting 30% of its staff and closing a site in the US: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/benevolentai-lays-30-staff-exits-us-site-funding-gap-looms
(speaking for myself, and not my employer here) AI is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. It has the promise of making drug development more efficient, as right now about 1 in 20 drugs that makes it into clinical trials winds up being approved. But the hype has gotten way ahead of the results, and my guess is that while the industry will get better at incorporating AI into workflows and AI can help improve success rates, we are not going to have robot overlords creating a humanity-killing scenario.
BC
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - Goose - 04-24-2024
(04-24-2024, 09:28 AM)BostonCard Wrote: Relax, on the very day that the MTL-backed announcement came out, another AI enabled drug developer, benevolent AI, announced it was cutting 30% of its staff and closing a site in the US: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/benevolentai-lays-30-staff-exits-us-site-funding-gap-loomsFor what little it is worth, I agree with you. Precision Drug Discovery was the first wave of how computers were going to "revolutionize" the industry. It didn't. After that, it was High Throughput Screening. Similar outcome. AI IMO will be similar. All these are important tools but none of them are by themselves "game changers". The only "winners" were the VCs who rode the hype to outlandish valuations.
(speaking for myself, and not my employer here) AI is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. It has the promise of making drug development more efficient, as right now about 1 in 20 drugs that makes it into clinical trials winds up being approved. But the hype has gotten way ahead of the results, and my guess is that while the industry will get better at incorporating AI into workflows and AI can help improve success rates, we are not going to have robot overlords creating a humanity-killing scenario.
BC
Also, I doubt MTL is going to spend a lot of time directly supervising research. He will have bigger fish to fry. It is also difficult to falsify results in industry. At the end of the day the FDA will demand efficacy and safety demonstrated in clinical trials. There is QA and GMP all over the place.
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - M T - 04-24-2024
Wow, smear a guy and then keep smearing by association. (“MTL…. falsify results”)
I don’t know him, but I have seen nothing that indicates HE falsified any results or knowingly published false results.
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - cardcrimson - 04-24-2024
For your reading pleasure, the future of AI, and that of humanity, as postulated by Isaac Asimov
The Last Question
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - TonyLima - 04-24-2024
(04-23-2024, 10:32 AM)82lsju Wrote:(04-23-2024, 09:44 AM)BostonCard Wrote: MTL will now lead a new company, Xaira Therapeutics, which had a splashy launch with $1 billion dollars of funding "to transform drug discovery and development with AI"
https://endpts.com/marc-tessier-lavigne-on-leaving-stanford-and-joining-ai-mega-startup-xaira/
Sorry, it is behind a paywall, but this is an interview with MTL about his new job. There was a question in the interview about his time at Stanford (and whether he intends to incorporate any changes in overseeing the research in his new position):
Quote:Dunn: On your time at Stanford, the investigation found no evidence of data manipulation or fraud on your part. But it did criticize your laboratory oversight and management, and you acknowledged there were things you should have done better. What specifically do you plan to do differently at Xaira in terms of supervising science? And why should you be trusted in that type of position?
Tessier-Lavigne: Well, first, I’m obviously here to talk about Xaira. But maybe I can share a few thoughts.
First, I stand by the quality and rigor of my body of research as a whole. I’ve run a research lab for over three decades with 74 papers which I’m a principal author, and a handful of them had issues, as you pointed out. The panel concluded that I didn’t engage in any scientific misconduct, and I could not have reasonably been expected to have known about it.
And in terms of the lessons I take from this, I have run my lab by putting trust in my team. I’ve had exceptional lab members. I trusted that the data they were presenting to me were real and accurate. In general, that trust was entirely merited. But that created a vulnerability that allowed for these issues to arise in a few papers. What I take from that is the importance of also having an appropriate level of skepticism about data that are brought.
Dunn: Are there specific changes you plan to incorporate in overseeing and leading Xaira?
Tessier-Lavigne: Certainly. What this has driven home for me is the importance of having controls in place to ensure that your data that come forward are real and accurate, and not to take that at face value. And it’s certainly a principle that I’ll be applying here.
BC
so he "trusted his team too much" or "it wasn't my fault"....
My reaction exactly. Blame the minions.
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - oldalum - 04-25-2024
T-L was and is responsible for creating a culture in which integrity of the research is the absolute, required, paramount value. You can't just assume it into being. The "minions" have to feel that when data/results don't come out as expected or desired, bringing that fact to the research team is lauded and will be rewarded. Even if it's just a pictorial or graphical presentation of valid results for publication, if there is time or other pressure such that someone would feel a need to substitute another image from some other part of the research that shows the same thing, there has to be a culture such that bringing the problem to light so the team or team leader can address it feels better to the pressured minion than doing the wrong thing.
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - chrisk - 04-25-2024
link to Fortune on Xaira's $1B funding and AI in drug discovery
https://fortune.com/2024/04/25/ai-for-drug-discovery-xaira-therapeutics/
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - Goose - 04-25-2024
(04-25-2024, 09:03 AM)oldalum Wrote: Even if it's just a pictorial or graphical presentation of valid results for publication, if there is time or other pressure such that someone would feel a need to substitute another image from some other part of the research that shows the same thing, there has to be a culture such that bringing the problem to light so the team or team leader can address it feels better to the pressured minion than doing the wrong thing.I basically agree that the culture is important. Rigor and honesty are values that need to be emphasized. That said, not all "pressure" is induced by the PI. Grad students/postdocs want to finish/get good recommendations. They have agendas too. First much scientific research/paper publication is "interesting" but not spectacularly important. It is very, very probable that nobody will ever repeat your experiment or rely on your result. Probably nobody will even scrutinize your publication very closely. You also aren't building a product based on this result so you won't get caught that way either. You will get a publication, the PI gets a publication, nobody cares about the result, you don't get caught. Even in the very, very improbable event somebody does try to repeat your results and fails, you will be long gone. Nobody can "prove" anything. In most cases, nobody will even try. You can just claim the group who tried to duplicate your result just has "bad hands" :). In short, you will get away with it.
Second, much research is done by individuals. It isn't a "team". Nobody else sees the results as a matter of course. Even when no fraud is intended, anomalous results are often neither recorded nor reported. You only have to make it "work" once. On top of that, lab notebooks in "academic research" settings are notorious for being incomplete, inaccurate, and not living up to "standards". This is an area where PIs often talk a good game but then don't follow up. They leave it to their "senior minions" to do so. Shouldn't be the case but almost always is. You probably won't get caught by somebody reading your notebook and finding time gaps and results missing that should be there. Again, you will get away with it.
Some people when confronted with a situation where 1) they won't get caught, 2) no obvious material harm will ensue to others, and 3) it will make said people's lives MUCH easier, will "cheat". This may be the ultimate example of the statement "Morality is what you do when nobody is looking". Not sure this is easy to change.
RE: Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug 31, 2023 - Mick - 05-14-2024
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions. Wiley will close 19 of their 2,000 research journals and take a $35 mms. to $40 mms. financial hit in 2024. I'm a bit bummed, they published both of my books and their current managing editor was a young editor when he took on my (non-research-related) manuscripts.
IOP Publishing discovered nearly 900 fraudulent papers. Paper mills have been a thorn in the side of publishers for a while now.
Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures