Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug. 31. He will also retract or issue lengthy corrections to five widely cited papers for which he was principal author after a Stanford-sponsored investigation found “manipulation of research data.”
Unfortunately that's how modern science works. The scientists with the best marketing skills get the grants, get their work mentioned in the media, and hence, get more prestigious work.
He is both a result of a broken system, and then became one of its key perpetuators. I bet he made some sweet bags of cash doing it.
So in his telling he was exonerated of wrongdoing, but he's retracting a bunch of papers and resigning as the president of Stanford. People really can tell themselves anything, can't they?
"Well that's it, boys. I've been redeemed. The preacher'sBoard of Trustees done warshed away all my sins and transgressions. It's the straight and narrow from here on out, and heaven everlasting'sa well funded retirement is my reward."
At some point soon they're going to be turning AIs loose on the collected scientific archives of history, I'm very curious to see how much long-forgotten and undetected fraud is going to be dug up by them. Four retractions per ten thousand articles seems like an implausibly low average given that humans are involved in writing these things.
The entire system just seems broken and encourages this type of behaviour. Just look at the Francesca Gino situation. I'm sure as this gets more attention, other discoveries will be made.
Retracting a paper is a rare act, especially for a scientist of Tessier-Lavigne’s stature. A database of retractions shows that only four in every 10,000 papers are retracted.
If you've ever read published research for a living, this statistic is frighteningly low.
Thank you for your insight as a person from a vastly superior culture that prevails corruption and fights for rightousness for everyone... For everyone, right? Concerned Padme face