Bill, here's another article on the resignation of Stanford's president:
Q&A: How this Stanford freshman brought down the president of the university (yahoo.com)
It all started with one 18-year-old guy who was a part of the Stanford Daily. He got the initial leads for this story from a site called PubPeer, where the suspicions originated from.
By the way, as I mentioned before, I'm most interested in how the Big Pharma firm Genentech was involved in this. From the article:
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That’s where our reporting goes a little bit further. We published a story in February which detailed the accounts of four very high-level executives and senior scientists at Genentech, recounting how there was an internal review in 2011 that ordered more research into the underlying experiments after finding out that they were having trouble replicating them.
After attempts to reproduce the research failed, the program was canceled and the postdoc [who did the experiments] left the company. These four senior executives concluded that it was because the underlying experiments had been fabricated. A fifth executive later told us the same thing.
After the report came out, you published a story that said several key witnesses refused to speak to the panel because they were not guaranteed anonymity.
Yes. Not only are these sources talking about a very powerful man, they're also bound by nondisclosure agreements with Genentech. With these lack of guarantees of anonymity, there was an unwillingness to speak to the committee.
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Did you see that? Genentech already knew that the research paper that Tessier-Lavigne was fabricated. But they never went public with their conclusions, partly due to non-disclosure agreements, but also partly due to how powerful and prominent Tessier-Lavigne was.
In any case, despite Genentech's unwillingness to go public with their findings, I find this to be yet another example of Big Pharma being one of the biggest adherents to the scientific process. Instead of taking the conclusions of a research paper at face value, they reviewed it and determined that they needed to try and replicate the results, which they tried but couldn't accomplish.
They're not like Saint Greta who tells us to "trust the science because ... because ... it's the sCiEnCe." Unlike TIME's Puppet of the Year, Genentech can't afford to make dumbass assumptions like that.
Tenchusatsu |
