Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Pres Rockefeller, S

molecular biologist Keith Yamamoto of UC San Francisco, who has held many leadership positions at UC San Francisco and elsewhere (including as current president of AAAS, Science’s publisher), says active researchers make better academic leaders.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, 63, is best known for his work in the 1990s discovering netrins, proteins that guide the growth of nerve cell projections known as axons in the developing spinal cord. His resignation brings an end to an extraordinary 8 months that began in late November 2022, when Stanford’s student paper, The Stanford Daily, reported that The EMBO Journal was investigating alleged image manipulation in a 2008 paper and that Bik had confirmed similar possible problems in other articles on which he was a co-author. The image issues had come to the newspaper’s attention via a discussion of them on PubPeer, a forum where scientists, often anonymously, discuss irregularities in papers. Stanford’s Board of Trustees announced it was forming a special committee to investigate.

Concerns about three papers—one in Cell in 1999 and two in Science in 2001—had first come up on PubPeer in 2015 when Tessier-Lavigne, then president of Rockefeller, was under consideration for the Stanford presidency. At the time, he submitted corrections to both journals, but Science failed to publish them because of an editorial error and Cell did not find a correction was needed. After the new publicity about the papers emerged, both journals in December 2022 added expressions of concern and said they were awaiting findings from the Stanford investigation. Tessier-Lavigne responded that he took responsibility for any errors and said: “The integrity of my work is of paramount importance to me, and I take any concerns that are expressed very seriously.”

In January, the special committee contracted Mark Filip, a former federal judge,