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Internal review finds falsified data in Stanford President’s Alzheimer research
- kickaha 4y agoBoy. There’s a lot to say about this story. But the most remarkable thing is the incredibly high quality of the journalism. Unbelievably thorough investigative reporting, outstanding exposition of highly technical items. From a college newspaper!
- hodgesrm 4y agoIt's really good. The most interesting part for me is toward the end where the article adduces evidence that Tessier-Lavigne rather than simply retracting instead wrote later papers that swept the earlier conclusions under the rug. The investigators mastered not just the science but the bureaucracy of research, making it a great read at multiple levels. > Schrag, the Alzheimer’s researcher without knowledge of the internal review, told The Daily that “to his credit, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne authored several of the later studies which revised the findings of his 2009 paper.” Some smart kids over there in Palo Alto. I hope they keep at it when they graduate.
- manquer 4y agoWhy is it surprising that college newspaper did it ? It is lot more likely to be able to get to spend countless hours required than a large commercial publication for an investigative piece ? Student journalists get paid far less if anything at all and will definitely be motivated in a story about their college and put in the extra hours than a professional journalist also easily tap into subject matter expertise right there in their college Journalism quality is a primarily function of how motivated the journalist (and the publisher) is about the story, there is no shortage of talent in university like Stanford.
- Animats 4y agoI wonder if the university will take action against the students involved.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bakul 4y agoWhy would Stanford do that? Baker’s author page shows this is not his first such investigation. https://stanforddaily.com/author/tabaker/ https://stanforddaily.com/author/tabaker/
- whamlastxmas 4y agoIt’s not without precedent at other universities. Let us not forget UC Berkeley I believe that unlawfully arrested student protesters and sprayed them with pepper spray while they were sitting there in handcuffs
- lofatdairy 4y agoIirc that was UC Davis (doesn't change anything except making sure the correct institution receives the black mark) and they tried to pay some org to remove that pic from the internet lmao.
- WillPostForFood 4y agoWhat precedent do you think that sets for journalism at a university?
- CPLX 4y agoIt sets the precedent that journalism that takes place at the university should not challenge the entrenched power structure. Which I would assume to be the point.
- dgs_sgd 4y agoI've heard from several friends at Stanford that the president is not well liked among the student body. That could be a secondary motivation for producing high quality journalism in an attempt to bring potential wrongdoings to light.
- pyuser583 4y agoI’ve heard Stanford governance in general is not well liked. And I mean hated with a passion by many. https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-soc...
- strangattractor 4y agoGoes to show how important being able to reproduce results of experiments is - especially in medicine. Me thinks we need more of it.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoIt is only high quality reporting until proved otherwise.
- cozzyd 4y agoI worked with the daily when I was a student (not doing reporting, but layout). Many of the people I worked with are pretty high profile journalists now.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoStanford seems to have a deep and recurring corruption problem. The admissions scandal. SBF. This. Is it just availability bias on my part?
- Brigand 4y agoPerhaps a factor is that somebody bothered to check. Who knows what is going on elsewhere.
- anonuser123456 4y agoProbably observation bias. Stanford is a big target that sticks out. Corruption is a part of all institutions; it is fundamentally inevitable.
- salawat 4y ago...you know what else is a big target that sticks out? A giant ball of corruption and deceit. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.
- bluGill 4y agoPlaces that care and investigate will in turn find corruption and you are likely to hear about it. Be concerned where you hear nothing as that sometimes means they don't care and are covering up. There are also ethical people and companies you hear nothing about, but in a all but the smallest orginizations it takes extreme effort to not have at least some
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- lofatdairy 4y agoProbably more so that Stanford's meteoric rise in prestige and social capital that it attracts a number of affluent, well-connected, ambitious types who are willing to set aside morality and used to getting their way. I highly, highly doubt Stanford educates the number of future scammers (Do Kwon, Holmes, etc) who matriculated there to conduct fraud, nor that they're representative of the institution at large.
- lapcat 4y agoI've always had the impression that we don't live in a meritocracy but rather a mendacracy, where the biggest liars and cheats rise to the top.
- amelius 4y agoUntil they get caught.
- CamperBob2 4y agoThat doesn't even matter anymore. See George Santos, R-NY.
- natch 4y agoOr for that matter, see: /\w+(?: \w+)+ R-[ACDFGIK-PS-W][ACDEH-LNORSTVXYZ]/
- natch 4y agoThis intentionally does not match some states that currently do not have R- representation, but by coincidence of letter combinations lets some others through. Fixing this is left as an exercise to the reader.
- kodah 4y agoWhen I was in charge of hiring I dealt with this every day. A huge swath of software engineers lie about their skills, involvement in projects, and just general accomplishments. These also tended to be the people who did best in our leetcode exercises.
- mistrial9 4y agohow did you find candidates? what were your internal (non-public) criteria ?
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- stanford_labrat 4y agoTo give some perspective, nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research”. This is an ethics class and it specifically covers things like falsifying data, plagiarism, how to ethically work in animal models etc. At my institution we actually had two whole lectures related to this, one was specifically about image manipulation and the other was about falsifying data. Another very high profile article related to Alzheimer’s and plaque formation was also recently retracted…weird. I’ve become very skeptical these days, of my fellow scientists, which is both a good and a bad thing.
- rencrisa 4y ago> nowadays all PhD students generally take something called “Responsible Conduct of Research” I think that is a broad generalization. I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student. > falsifying data, plagiarism, how to ethically work in animal models ... image manipulation. My take is that this may be a "field"-dependent class. My PhD is in a non-experimental field (math); thus, we cannot have these sorts of issues (minus plagiarism).
- gdmt 4y agoI think this is a requirement for PhD programs funded by T32 training grants from the NIH.
- mabbo 4y ago> I never had to take an ethics in research course as a PhD student. What often happens is that a given program is required to include an ethics portion or course, so the university has some mandatory class whose syllabus reads "this class will include an ethics portion". Then there just never seems to be the time needed to get to that material. At least, that's how my computer science degree went.
- Sniffnoy 4y agoFWIW, I did a PhD at University of Michigan, finishing in 2014. We did have to take this class -- I gather that the university put off implementing it for quite a while but eventually they gave in and did it. Nobody involved with it really seemed to want to be. A lot of the class consisted of videos, the contents of which were mostly irrelevant to mathematics (dealing with things like falsification of data). The people assigned to teach it (it was someone different each week) would try to talk about what was in there, but there wasn't much to talk about because so little of it was relevant to math (mostly just plagiarism, as you say). In an attempt to do something useful with the remaining time, most of the professors ended up turning it into something of a career-and-publishing Q&A, answering questions about various issues (though not really ethical issues) that can come up in writing and publishing papers. <shrug> (I seem to recall one of the professors tried more seriously to actually stick to the material, but he was an exception...)
- zetazzed 4y agoStill not the most controversial Stanford president... The first pres there, David Starr Jordan, has long been accused of covering up the murder of Jane Stanford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starr_Jordan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starr_Jordan. Oh, he was a eugenicist too, but I guess that's less surprising? (Covered at length in the book "Why Fish Don't Exist")
- fuckHNtho 4y agosee his rebuttal here: https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/false-allegations-stanford-daily https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/false-allegati...
- lapcat 4y agoI've vouched for this comment. Not sure why it was flagged. Regardless of whether you believe Tessier-Lavigne's denial, it's directly relevant to the story.
- hitekker 4y agoThe GP appears to have been shadow banned for stirring flame wars like accusing Bill Gates of being a pedophile. The username is a bit of a tell.
- paganel 4y ago[flagged]
- steponlego 4y ago[flagged]
- fuckHNtho 4y ago[dead]
- zaroth 4y ago> Genentech, in a written statement to The Daily, confirmed that an internal review took place in 2011, a fact that was not previously public. The company characterized the review as “routine.” When asked whether this was accurate, the scientist whom The Daily confirmed belonged to the research review committee said, “no no no no no no.” So wild reading that. Would be very funny if it wasn’t so deadly serious.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bluecalm 4y agoLet's see how many of his current positions (Stanford president, boards of directors, advisory boards) he is going to keep. It seems to me lying is a great strategy in today's society as you rarely face harsh consequences and you about never lose more than you have already gained thanks to it.
- trinsic2 4y agoYep, no accountability in institutions on political and business levels. And judicial systems go along with it. Their digging their own graves.
- itronitron 4y agoUnfortunately, a lot of universities and companies probably consider that his handling of this debacle makes him uniquely qualified to come work for them.
- evrydayhustling 4y agoThe denial quotes throughout the article are suspiciously narrow. In particular, they are always specific to the Nature paper, whick leaves plenty of opportunity for investigation and discussion of internal documents that preceded it.
- evrydayhustling 4y agoHave to reply to myself to say that Lavigne's own denial is much more robust. It is linked in a comment below.
- JadeNB 4y agoThe comment (by a user whose name ends with …HNtho): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849006 . The rebuttal: https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/false-allegations-stanford-daily https://tessier-lavigne-lab.stanford.edu/news/false-allegati... .
- bhk 4y agoActually, it smacks of misdirection to me. He portrays the matter as one of a mistaken theory or hypothesis that was later invalidated (how science works), which deflects from the key allegation of experimental data being falsified or fabricated.
- itronitron 4y ago"I have never submitted a paper without firmly believing that the data were correct and accurately presented." which is another way of saying... "it's not a lie if you believe it" To give them the benefit of the doubt though, if they realized the data was wrong they should have requested a retraction. That they didn't after being requested to do so speaks a lot, to me at least.
- norwalkbear 4y agoThe universities need be audited.
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- IncRnd 4y agoFrom Nikolaev in the article: "I can only speak for myself…and say I did not do anything wrong when I was at Genentech." That's practically the canonical form of saying, "I did it, but I'm going to demur and blame it on other unspecified people." People who test the veracity of others call this an "exclusion qualifier." [1] [1] https://jacksonzheng.com/the-cia-uses-these-methods-to-tell-if-someone-is-lying-56e84793398c?gi=3c453f173ebc https://jacksonzheng.com/the-cia-uses-these-methods-to-tell-...
- fredsmith219 4y agoCanceling all fun on campus is just inviting any and all negative press and reviews that the students can dig up.
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- wolverine876 4y agoThe problem, or a problem, is us. We overlook lies of certain forms, almost without thinking. For example, look at the claims that the Genentech internal review was routine. I don't believe it at all; I read it as 'we believe this claim will stand because you can't prove otherwise'. That is not honesty at all, but a normalized protocol for lying. I'll bet you didn't think twice about the integrity of doing that. But my key point is that, if that claim is disproven, what is the result? Do we say Genentech and the individuals making these claims are liars, and not to be trusted? Are they shamed and shunned, their reputations damaged? No, we've normalized accepting these lies; it will just be viewed as losing a game, as the normal result of the protocol - it was disproven so the claim falls. Honesty is not implicated. We are lied to because we accept it, we normalize it, we don't even notice it.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago> I'll bet you didn't think twice about the integrity of doing that. "You" however is "readers on HN" and they very very likely did think about the integrity. Your point stands, of course, that the sleight of hand/speech is an attempt to pull a fast on one readers in general.
- wolverine876 4y agoI don't find most HN commenters think critically about integrity or accuracy. IMHO, * Many follow the crowd in attacking whoever is the target, and sometimes that includes raising questions about integrity, etc. * Many attack the integrity, etc. of everything, which isn't thinking critically - it's the opposite.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoi've noticed that your observations are true increasingly often the last year or so, in contrast to years earlier on HN. it's very disappointing.
- wolverine876 4y ago> Each of the four senior Genentech scientists was contacted individually by The Daily and was unaware of the others’ accounts. Their independent accounts, given over several hours of interviews, were highly consistent with each other, and also consistent with publicly available information about the research. It doesn't invalidate the entire story in any significant way, but after all these years, even after an hour or a day or two, wouldn't they all have been aware of each other's accounts and points of view? They may have explicitly reconciled them years ago - 'holy cow, what are we going to say?' Genentech may have coached them - in fact, I would almost expect it.
- fidgewidge 4y agoTotally unsurprising. Bet Stanford's not the only one with a president like that. Something that became really clear during COVID is the sheer extent to which universities seem to lack basic research ethics. The ivermectin debate could be summed up as "once we exclude obviously fraudulent papers, what do we have left" which is why it was so rancorous. Disease prediction as a field is pure fraud: they cannot predict epidemics, never could, aren't on track to be able to, don't use the scientific method and yet routinely make predictions with absolute confidence whilst claiming to be scientists. Microbiology is flooded with papers that are quite obviously being manufactured by professional fraudsters, logical fallacies and false statements are easy to find across many fields, every other paper falls apart the moment you poke it yet nobody cares about any of this. Universities don't care, journals don't care, peers don't care, nobody within the academic system cares. Why don't they care? Why don't universities actually fire professors who are found to have been writing BS papers? The only viable explanation is that the people at the top know full well that this behavior is at saturation levels and trying to clean it up would destroy their institutions. How could they know that? If they got to the top by doing it themselves, that would definitely be one explanation.
- m348e912 4y agoI assume the fraudulent papers were the ones that claimed ivermectin was effective against covid?
- gutitout 4y agoYou’re kidding, right?
- sbaiddn 4y agoWhy would you assume that? You'd have to read a scientific paper to reach that conclusion (or do the experiment yourself) and the trustworthiness of that is what is at issue!
- yyyk 4y agoThat was most of them. But I recall at least one deceptive Lancet paper arguing against ivermectin which was also fraudulent. Lancet has a long long problem with controversial papers with the 'right' opinion which get far less scrutiny than required.
- ilamont 4y agoHe’s gone. Remember Joi Ito at MIT Media Lab? You can deny and claim ignorance and shift responsibility but once multiple real witnesses start coming forward your position is untenable and you’re out. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20905905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20905905 Kudos to the Stanford Daily editorial team for following the story despite the official denials and probable warnings. Good journalism matters.
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- neilv 4y ago> Feb. 17, 2023, 12:17 a.m. Did they Friday news dump (before a 3-day weekend) their own big story?