Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - Printable Version
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RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - Goose - 12-10-2022
(12-10-2022, 10:15 PM)dabigv13 Wrote:No it isn't, at least not in all cases. What is true is that if you do it, you have to say you did it and why. My point here is that the "doctored" photo supported the paper's conclusions. MTL didn't know it was altered, at least as far as we know. The PI, post-docs, and grad students in the meeting would have seen exactly what the reviewers of the paper saw, an image that supports the papers conclusion. No amount of review at that level could detect a potential fraud.Quote:As I understand it, the claims made in the paper are supported by the images. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the images are not totally "original", and in one case the area that is altered is in a location that may have contained a band indicating the presence of a protein that would contradict the paper's conclusions. Reviewing that image very, very carefully would have led to (and did support) the paper's conclusions. Only if one examined the image with special software would it's provenance been in question. It is also probable at the time this data was published that software didn't yet exist. Was there a band there? We don't know.
Not really sure what you're saying here. But some important things A) even "cleaning up" images is bad, important to understand. Not behavior to emulate.
Quote:And B) in the Cell paper, some conclusions rest on the presence of a certainly falsified band on the Western blot. He was senior author.My understanding was it was an absence of a band. Same idea in either case. If the image is "doctored" and MTL isn't informed of that, how is he supposed to detect that fact? You can't tell by just looking. You need this software that detects probable manipulations. Back in the day when these papers were written, that software wasn't written yet. Even if it did exist it isn't the standard of practice to run it on every image file in your lab.
Quote:And my answer, given what we know now, is not very guilty at all. Unless he knew about the manipulations before the fact, I don't think there is anything he could have reasonably done to avoid this situation. If somebody is altering images in a way that nobody could detect before the advent of this software (and why do we believe this software is that reliable and issues no false positives?), what could MTL have done differently to avoid this situation?Quote:Last week, Bik found another manipulated image in that paper, which she says appears to be “deliberately changing the results” and could indicate data falsification. Cell Press said the “new concerns … warrant a closer look” and it now plans to investigate. The only authors on all three challenged papers are Tessier-Lavigne and a postdoc then at UCSF who apparently hasn’t published a paper since 2012. She did not respond to emails from Science.
From above linked Science editorial.
MTL is not innocent here, that much is really beyond dispute. It's just a matter of how guilty.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - dabigv13 - 12-10-2022
There are two authors on that paper. Hopefully the investigation is able to get a truthful and full discussion of these issues with the other author.
MTL's best defense is ignorance and that is somewhat damning itself.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - chimera - 12-10-2022
(12-10-2022, 09:40 PM)Goose Wrote:(12-10-2022, 08:10 PM)jonnyss Wrote: so what do folks think of chimera's post that, when she worked in a similar lab, the pi and junior scientists and techs met for hours looking at their images and debating whether the results were significant?As I understand it, the claims made in the paper are supported by the images. That isn't the problem. The problem is that the images are not totally "original", and in one case the area that is altered is in a location that may have contained a band indicating the presence of a protein that would contradict the paper's conclusions. Reviewing that image very, very carefully would have led to (and did support) the paper's conclusions. Only if one examined the image with special software would it's provenance been in question. It is also probable at the time this data was published that software didn't yet exist. Was there a band there? We don't know.
these images are not like graphs or figures representing the data. these are the data.
i, for one, trust her personal experience that neuroscientists don't just publish these images without reviewing them very very carefully.
If one looks at the lab notebooks kept by most graduate students, there are lots of things missing that should be there. They still get signed. Even if one looks at the lab notebooks of most biotech companies there are plenty of things not done perfectly or completely. Only things that are going to be externally audited are going to be a priority to get right. It is also often true that the things one wants to know retrospectively about a certain experiment were not recorded because it wasn't at all obvious they mattered. People end up interrogating the technicians hoping they recall the missing pieces. These things happen even when everybody is doing their best. If somebody is photoshopping, the odds of getting caught aren't all that great.
I worked for many years in a lab and did a whole lot of Western blots (and a bunch of other types, oh the blots, always with the blots). I looked carefully at the images that were in the stories and to me it looked reasonably obvious that some images were re-used and portions of some images had been manipulated. Maybe I am wrong about that because I know something is off so I am looking in a way I would not be if I did not already know that. But sure looked to me that the problems in some of those images would have been something that a PI who was looking carefully at all the images in the paper and who was reasonably familiar with the work being done would have noticed (as I would hope someone with authorship would be even if the work was done in another lab). We used to ask for and get pics of the work done in other labs so we could see what they chose to include in the paper out of what they had in regards to a specific figure or image, especially stuff like blots that they probably did a lot of. Blots are easy to evaluate. They are also easy to mis-use and manipulate.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - oldalum - 12-11-2022
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has promulgated authorship criteria that hundreds of biomedical journals use; all authors must certify that they meet these criteria. Science lists its slightly modified version of these criteria in its policies on authorship: (only the relevant criteria are below)
"Each author . . .
agrees to be personally accountable for the author’s own contributions and for ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and documented in the literature."
It appears to me that Science does not require authors, even the first or last author, to be personally accountable for the integrity of other authors' contributions to the paper, only to help investigate questions about them.
The ICMJE version of the relevant criteria reads:
"Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors."
[It is not clear to me how authors are expected to satisfy that last sentence.]
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - 82lsju - 12-15-2022
an update from the Daily on MTL's research papers
https://stanforddaily.com/2022/12/15/tessier-lavigne-papers-editorial-expressions-of-concern/
and his second letter to the faculty earlier this week
https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/letter-stanford-colleagues
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - dabigv13 - 12-15-2022
Today the story made the WSJ.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stanford-presidents-research-draws-concern-from-scientific-journals-11671142757
Mostly a summation of what we've seen before but this little bit was interesting to me.
Quote:Dr. Thorp said the journal decided to issue expressions of editorial concern on the two papers after days of discussion and examination. Science said it published eight expressions of concern and 11 retractions from 2017 to 2021.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - BigJohn043 - 12-16-2022
(12-10-2022, 12:50 PM)BostonCard Wrote: MTL reported all three of the known issues in the articles he was a senior author on. Cell told him “no big deal” and didn’t bother with a correction. Science apparently accepted corrections to the two articles he had with them, but due to an issue at the journal, never published the errata.
I do wonder if this scandal would be a lot different if those errata had been published.
BC
I am a business person and not a scientist so I know very little about this world. I would welcome someone to correct me.
Mistakes are going to be made. That is just the way the world works. But if someone is willing to correct their mistakes it speaks to both their intent originally and their focus on doing what is right even if it is embarrassing to them.
To me there are only two questions here:
Are these mistakes so obvious that it speaks to MTL's basic abilities as a researcher and scientist?
Did he really try to correct the record as soon as he became aware of the issues or at some later date to cover himself?
On the one hand, he should probably step aside while this is all sorted out. On the other, assuming he did the right things this is potentially really grossly unfair to him.
I guess time will tell....
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - cardcrimson - 12-16-2022
Perhaps it's just me, but there seems to be a difference between making a mistake and publishing images that had been digitally altered.
(12-16-2022, 07:06 AM)BigJohn043 Wrote:(12-10-2022, 12:50 PM)BostonCard Wrote: MTL reported all three of the known issues in the articles he was a senior author on. Cell told him “no big deal” and didn’t bother with a correction. Science apparently accepted corrections to the two articles he had with them, but due to an issue at the journal, never published the errata.
I do wonder if this scandal would be a lot different if those errata had been published.
BC
I am a business person and not a scientist so I know very little about this world. I would welcome someone to correct me.
Mistakes are going to be made. That is just the way the world works. But if someone is willing to correct their mistakes it speaks to both their intent originally and their focus on doing what is right even if it is embarrassing to them.
To me there are only two questions here:
Are these mistakes so obvious that it speaks to MTL's basic abilities as a researcher and scientist?
Did he really try to correct the record as soon as he became aware of the issues or at some later date to cover himself?
On the one hand, he should probably step aside while this is all sorted out. On the other, assuming he did the right things this is potentially really grossly unfair to him.
I guess time will tell....
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - dabigv13 - 12-16-2022
So first off, the images were digitally altered, unclear if by MTL or an associate at this time. It was not something that just happened due to random chance or serendipity. So either MTL altered images, encouraged others to alter the images, or in the best light, did not notice that the images had been altered until someone else pointed it out.
Also, while he did submit corrections after someone else noticed the problems, he did not submit any correction for the most problematic issue, a western blot in the Cell paper that had not been identified as altered until recently and that was an alteration that actually impacts the interpretation of the results, while the others could more generously be seen as making the pictures look nicer.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - jonnyss - 12-16-2022
(12-15-2022, 09:48 AM)82lsju Wrote: an update from the Daily on MTL's research papers
https://stanforddaily.com/2022/12/15/tessier-lavigne-papers-editorial-expressions-of-concern/
and his second letter to the faculty earlier this week
https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/letter-stanford-colleagues
thanks for posting these links. wow, in his letter to the faculty mtl is great at mis-direction - almost as good as brock purdy blinding the seahawks to kittle running free. mtl seems to say, more or less,
"the concerns are old news...
please direct your attention to the following cases where it wasn't my responsibility...
please direct your attention to the following cases where it was my responsibility, but the changes are cosmetic and were common practice...
please direct your attention to the following cases where the journal dropped the ball...
recently there have been other concerns which i shall neither name nor address."
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - Goose - 12-16-2022
(12-16-2022, 04:04 PM)dabigv13 Wrote: So first off, the images were digitally altered, unclear if by MTL or an associate at this time. It was not something that just happened due to random chance or serendipity. So either MTL altered images, encouraged others to alter the images, or in the best light, did not notice that the images had been altered until someone else pointed it out.Don't forget the fourth option. MTL never saw anything but the altered images. He may not have known they were altered until the program spotted the indications that a human would not see. FWIW, if I had a set of images that "needed" altering to make my point, I sure wouldn't show the unaltered ones to anybody first.
Quote:Also, while he did submit corrections after someone else noticed the problems, he did not submit any correction for the most problematic issue, a western blot in the Cell paper that had not been identified as altered until recently and that was an alteration that actually impacts the interpretation of the results, while the others could more generously be seen as making the pictures look nicer.Again, they had not been identified as altered "until recently". It could have been news to him as much as it was to anybody else. I just don't see MTL, who was already well known, submitting a paper where he KNEW the photo of the blot was altered to change the result. It is not like one Cell paper more or less was going to have any effect on his career. Aside from any moral objections, why do it? You gain nothing but could lose everything. Just not worth the risk. Until we know "what he knew and when he knew it", I don't think we can say he was in any way dishonest.
It MIGHT be possible to criticize his supervision of his post-doc if in fact that was where the alteration took place. Unfortunately, we may never really know that. The post-doc can't claim they didn't know the published figure didn't match reality if in fact the post-doc did the experiment. If OTOH it was a grad student, even that isn't for sure.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - M T - 12-16-2022
If a physician diagnoses a particular condition partly based on the report from the radiologist of images the physician ordered, but the radiologist altered the images before the physician ever saw them, then the physician is guilty of what?
If the physician doesn't edit/amend/review his/her diagnosis until much later when someone notices the image has been altered, is the physician at fault for not doing it earlier?
Do physicians ever run software to determine if images they've ordered might have been altered?
(I will note that we, or at least I, don't know whether MTL saw the original images or ran software to detect if the images were altered later when they were submitted to the journals. From what I read in the PubPeer discussions a week or two ago, the creating authors took responsibility for their own images. It wasn't "unclear". Did you read something different there?)
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - TrumpCard - 12-16-2022
(12-16-2022, 05:39 PM)Goose Wrote: I just don't see MTL, who was already well known, submitting a paper where he KNEW the photo of the blot was altered to change the result. It is not like one Cell paper more or less was going to have any effect on his career. Aside from any moral objections, why do it? You gain nothing but could lose everything. Just not worth the risk.
This is good advice. You should go back in time and give it to many criminal defendants who've pleaded guilty or been convicted of doing stupid shit they did not need to do. See, for example, the powerful/wealthy defendants who went to jail in this fiasco:
https://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/case-studies/raj-rajaratnam-and-insider-trading-2/.
Or this billionaire who engaged in illegal lobbying for no good reason:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/elliott-broidy-pleads-guilty-back-channel-lobbying-campaign-drop-1mdb-investigation-and.
The examples of this sort of thing happening are many and frequent.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - jonnyss - 12-16-2022
(12-16-2022, 05:50 PM)M T Wrote: If a physician diagnoses a particular condition partly based on the report from the radiologist of images the physician ordered, but the radiologist altered the images before the physician ever saw them, then the physician is guilty of what?
If the physician doesn't edit/amend/review his/her diagnosis until much later when someone notices the image has been altered, is the physician at fault for not doing it earlier?
Do physicians ever run software to determine if images they've ordered might have been altered?
(I will note that we, or at least I, don't know whether MTL saw the original images or ran software to detect if the images were altered later when they were submitted to the journals. From what I read in the PubPeer discussions a week or two ago, the creating authors took responsibility for their own images. It wasn't "unclear". Did you read something different there?)
if you are comparing to radiology physicians, then we have the tech producing the image, the resident (aka post-graduate fellow) interpreting the image, and the attending physician reviewing and signing off. the attending, not the tech or the resident, is responsible for accuracy. imo in this case, since mtl is senior or corresponding author of the report containing the images, mtl is comparable to the attending radiologist. the journal is comparable to a surgeon or internist receiving and trusting the images and the attending radiologist's interpretation. indeed, i would not expect the journal to catch the doctoring. to be very specific, if the radiology report says an image was taking x minutes after infusion of y dye; and it turns out the actual timing of the image, or the chemical infused, is different than on the report, yes the internist who ordered the study is not responsible for the error, but the attending radiologist very much is responsible even if it's the tech who gave the wrong dye or took the image too soon or too late, or if it's the resident who wrote it down wrong in the report.
the folks who have posted here that they worked in similar labs say 1) their images were reviewed and debated at length by their entire lab, including the pi, and 2) the doctoring of many of the mtl images is blatant, really hard to miss.
regarding, "In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors." [It is not clear to me how authors are expected to satisfy that last sentence.]
to me that references not the integrity of the co-author, which indeed may be hard to assess, but rather the integrity of the data. i believe you assess the integrity of the data not by asserting that a corresponding author produced the image but rather by looking carefully at the blots yourself and perhaps having several associates in your lab review the blots as well. as i read his announcements, mtl has not said, "as required, i reviewed all my co-authors' blots. they seemed fine to me at the time."
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - Goose - 12-16-2022
(12-16-2022, 09:33 PM)jonnyss Wrote: the folks who have posted here that they worked in similar labs say 1) their images were reviewed and debated at length by their entire lab, including the pi, and 2) the doctoring of many of the mtl images is blatant, really hard to miss.There is one very good reason to believe that the doctoring of the MTL images was in fact NOT blatant, really hard to miss. As you undoubtedly know, there papers are peer reviewed before publication. NONE of the reviewers raised questions about these figures. If it was so obvious why didn't the reviewers see it? Clearly, the idea that it was obvious is not supported by facts.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - dabigv13 - 12-16-2022
Great reply jonnyss. Sums up my thinking as well.
MTL, in the best light, is still responsible for a paper with fraudulent data, even if his postdoc did all the photo editing without MTL's knowledge or direction. The postdoc is his trainee, and direct report in business parlance. If he screws up, the professor is still responsible on some level for not properly monitoring or training that person.
And it happened multiple times.
Quote:There is one very good reason to believe that the doctoring of the MTL images was in fact NOT blatant, really hard to miss. As you undoubtedly know, there papers are peer reviewed before publication. NONE of the reviewers raised questions about these figures. If it was so obvious why didn't the reviewers see it? Clearly, the idea that it was obvious is not supported by facts.
Peer review is simply not designed to pick up things like this. It's done on a volunteer basis in the spare time of usually overworked scientists, who generally trust that people aren't lying about their actual data.
The peer review process could certainly use some changes but that's ancillary to the discussion of MTL's culpability.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - Goose - 12-17-2022
(12-16-2022, 10:35 PM)dabigv13 Wrote: Great reply jonnyss. Sums up my thinking as well.If the doctoring was "blatant", anybody who looked at the images at all critically should have picked it up. I would argue peer review is indeed designed to pick up blatant, obvious fraud. I do agree that the bias of the reviewers is that the data is genuine, but when evaluating the culpability of MTL the assertion that the fraud was "blatant" certainly would greatly increase his culpability. I expect the bias of the PI is that his people's data is genuine as well, probably more so. The reviewer's bias if anything should be less. There are also at least two reviewers, so one reviewer doing a slipshod job wouldn't explain not seeing a "blatant" fraud. The articles are also reviewed twice by the journal, once to decide if they merit being sent out for review at all and once to make sure the journal has assembled everything correctly before it is printed. Again, nobody found anything worthy of question. I could add that after printing (20 years ago) this allegedly "blatant" altering of the images was not noted by the readers of the journal at the time. However, the quality (and size) of the printed reproductions is often such that it is hard to tell what they show :-).
MTL, in the best light, is still responsible for a paper with fraudulent data, even if his postdoc did all the photo editing without MTL's knowledge or direction. The postdoc is his trainee, and direct report in business parlance. If he screws up, the professor is still responsible on some level for not properly monitoring or training that person.
And it happened multiple times.
Quote:There is one very good reason to believe that the doctoring of the MTL images was in fact NOT blatant, really hard to miss. As you undoubtedly know, there papers are peer reviewed before publication. NONE of the reviewers raised questions about these figures. If it was so obvious why didn't the reviewers see it? Clearly, the idea that it was obvious is not supported by facts.
Peer review is simply not designed to pick up things like this. It's done on a volunteer basis in the spare time of usually overworked scientists, who generally trust that people aren't lying about their actual data.
The peer review process could certainly use some changes but that's ancillary to the discussion of MTL's culpability.
As I understand it, there are three images that the detection software indicates are "suspicious". I don't know that the software can "prove" they were altered, but it can make a case that some pixel pattern is "extremely unlikely in nature". Two of these anomalies are in areas of their corresponding images that don't make any difference to the conclusions in the paper. Why someone would go to the trouble to make such an edit is unclear. Practicing perhaps? Cleaning up an imperfection of some kind? We don't know. The third anomaly is in are area of an image that "matters". We don't know what the alteration actually changed (because we don't have the original), only that it was in an important area.
If the "charge" against MTL is that he (and his lab) did not adequately review the images and "spot" the editing (if it was editing), that editing needs to be "obvious" enough that people (like the reviewers) who have experience looking at such images would reasonably be expected to pick it up. I haven't seen any evidence this is the case, in fact what evidence we have points in the opposite direction.
I do agree that if the data was edited, MTL is "responsible" because his postdoc produced the data, whether he knew about it or not. But then, in the same vein, so are the reviewers, and so is the journal that published it. It would be real interesting to know if anybody cares enough about this to repeat the experiment and see what the blot should have shown. That result wouldn't "exonerate" anybody who was fooled by a doctored image, but it would potentially increase the culpability if the data was false. So far, AFAIK, nobody has owned up to altering the images. As I have said before, MTL is certainly responsible in some sense if the data was altered. However, if he did everything that one could reasonably expect him to do, i.e. he wasn't "sloppy" about accepting a blatant fraud, I can't hold him morally responsible.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - Goose - 12-17-2022
(12-16-2022, 06:06 PM)TrumpCard Wrote:The examples you cite all involve the guilty parties making a very large amount of money by their "stupid" actions. In one case 900K, in the other "many millions". While one might argue their actions were "stupid" because they were not in desperate need of money (and were at great risk of getting caught), my point was that MTL would gain very, very little from one journal article more or less. His loss function would be much steeper and his gains much less, so much so that it would make no sense. A run of the mill journal article doesn't move the meter like a million dollars might.(12-16-2022, 05:39 PM)Goose Wrote: I just don't see MTL, who was already well known, submitting a paper where he KNEW the photo of the blot was altered to change the result. It is not like one Cell paper more or less was going to have any effect on his career. Aside from any moral objections, why do it? You gain nothing but could lose everything. Just not worth the risk.
This is good advice. You should go back in time and give it to many criminal defendants who've pleaded guilty or been convicted of doing stupid shit they did not need to do. See, for example, the powerful/wealthy defendants who went to jail in this fiasco:
https://sevenpillarsinstitute.org/case-studies/raj-rajaratnam-and-insider-trading-2/.
Or this billionaire who engaged in illegal lobbying for no good reason:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/elliott-broidy-pleads-guilty-back-channel-lobbying-campaign-drop-1mdb-investigation-and.
The examples of this sort of thing happening are many and frequent.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - TrumpCard - 12-17-2022
And the parents who went to jail to get their kids into U$C? I might argue their kids got negative value from the parents’ criminal activity and that the kids would’ve been better off at a Cal State school.
RE: Tessier-Lavigne research under investigation for scientific misconduct - Goose - 12-17-2022
(12-17-2022, 01:31 PM)TrumpCard Wrote: And the parents who went to jail to get their kids into U$C? I might argue their kids got negative value from the parents’ criminal activity and that the kids would’ve been better off at a Cal State school.You are totally right there. It was stupid, immoral, and had no big up side. Some of these kids probably didn't belong in college at all. Olivia Jade certainly didn't want to be there.