Not long after he arrived on the Stanford University campus in 2022 as a 17-year-old freshman, Theo Baker received a tip about the school’s president, the neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Baker, the son of two prominent Washington, D.C., journalists, had joined the staff of The Stanford Daily and was looking for a story he could dig into. And here it was: On a website called PubPeer, a forum for discussing scientific papers, critics were claiming that papers coming out of Tessier-Lavigne’s lab contained manipulated and fraudulent data. And that it had been going on for years.
Tessier-Lavigne has focused much of his career on searching for the key that might unlock Alzheimer’s, a disease that has long frustrated scientists. Prior to becoming a university president—he headed The Rockefeller University before taking the Stanford post in 2016—Tessier-Lavigne oversaw Genentech’s huge 1,400-person laboratory. His private sector work had made him wealthy, and, in the world of Alzheimer’s science, famous. He had co-authored several papers that were considered pathbreaking, especially a 2009 paper published while he was at Genentech. The paper had four authors but as the lab leader, Tessier-Lavigne was listed as the “principal investigator,” or PI. Calling the research a “significant breakthrough,” he boasted that it could ”turn our understanding of Alzheimer’s upside down.”