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Barb was the youngest in her large Irish Catholic family — a surprise baby, the ninth child, born 10 years after the eighth. Living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, her family followed the football schedule: high school games on Friday night, college games on Saturday, the Steelers on Sunday. Dad was an engineer, mom was a homemaker and Barb was the family mascot, blond and adorable, watching her brothers and sisters finish school and go on to their careers.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling,

Published4 days agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, SuppliedBy Hannah RitchieBBC News, SydneyAn Australian police officer charged with tasering a 95-year-old care home resident acted in a “grossly disproportionate” way, prosecutors in the case say.Clare Nowland died in May, a week after the incident which was prompted when she was found holding two knives. New court documents allege Kristian White said “bugger it” before firing as she slowly advanced using a walker.He is yet to enter a plea on grievous bodily harm and assault charges.Details of the incident in the town of Cooma – about 114km (71 miles) south of Canberra – have been outlined for the first time in police facts tendered to court.Just after 03:00 local time on 17 May, Ms Nowland was spotted walking along a corridor in Yallambee Lodge while holding two knives. Twice, the dementia patient was asked by a nurse to drop the knives, police say, to which she replied “no”. She was later found holding them while standing inside another resident’s room.After failing to reach Ms Nowland’s family, staff called emergency services with the intention of having an ambulance come to sedate her, the police facts say.It was around that time that workers allege the dementia patient threw a knife at one of her carers. After police and ambulance workers arrived on the scene, Ms Nowland began moving “very slowly” on her walker towards them with the remaining knife raised. Mr White asked Ms Nowland to drop the knife and stop moving four times before discharging his weapon from 1.5-2m (4.92-6.5 feet) away, police allege.The senior constable also warned her that he was pointing a taser at her chest.”Clare, stop now, see this, this is a taser, drop it now, drop it, this is your first warning,” he said, according to the documents.Ms Nowland suffered a fractured skull and a serious brain bleed from falling and hitting her head after she was tasered.Prosecutors say Mr White – who has been suspended from duty without pay pending the outcome of the criminal investigation – used “excessive force” given Ms Nowland’s age and physical state.Police procedures dictate that a taser “should not be used against an elderly or disabled subject unless exceptional circumstances exist”, the documents added. The Nowland family have asked for “privacy and space” while they digest the police facts, according to a statement released by their lawyer. “The facts alleged against Mr White are extremely confronting and shocking,” it said.Kristian White – who is on bail – is due to appear before a Cooma court again on 6 September.More on this story95-year-old woman Tasered by police in Australia diesPublished24 May

Published21 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, ReutersAn independent panel resigned in a row over controversial research about the impact of abortion on the mental health of women, BBC News can reveal.The research, which is still being used in US legal cases about limiting access to abortion, was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, in 2011.Last year, the panel recommended it be withdrawn. But journal owner, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, overruled it. The Royal College said the work had already been fully investigated.However, BBC Newsnight understands all three panel members, and two other members of the journal’s editorial board, resigned in protest. They have called into question the journal’s editorial independence.’Very serious lapse’The 2011 paper is a systematic review conducted by US psychologist, Prof Priscilla Coleman. It concludes that women who’ve had an abortion have an 81% increased risk of developing mental health problems.Prof Coleman worked for 20 years as a Professor of Human Development and Family Studies, at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. Her research appeared in a brief submitted to the US Supreme Court as part of successful efforts to overturn the historic Roe v Wade judgment, which guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion in the US. In April, the paper was also cited by a judge in Texas, when concluding one of the two main drugs used for medical abortion in the US, Mifepristone, should have its approval suspended. The case is ongoing. Four ways the end of Roe v Wade has changed the USThe woman who wants to end abortion in America What is Roe v Wade ruling on abortion? When Prof Coleman’s paper was first published in 2011, 10 letters were sent to the British Journal of Psychiatry criticising the quality of the research. Two called for its retraction.”We don’t believe that the results are reliable or credible”, said one signatory, Prof Julia Littell, an expert at Bryn Mawr College. She argued it did not meet best practice standards of the time. “I’ve never called for the retraction of a paper before,” she has since told the BBC. “This is a very serious lapse of scientific integrity.” A review published three months later in December 2011, co-authored by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, also found that methodological problems brought into question the paper’s results and conclusions. Image source, Getty ImagesIn 2022, with the research influencing women’s healthcare in the US, some of the same scientists wrote again to request the work be retracted. The British Journal of Psychiatry then formed an independent panel, which spent four months assessing the complaints and ultimately recommended the paper should be retracted. However, that never happened. “Our recommendation basically disappears into the ether,” panel member and Harvard psychiatrist, Dr Alex Tsai, told the BBC. “At some point we receive a letter from the communications director at the Royal College of Psychiatrists saying that the case is closed and the retraction is not going to be implemented.”Fellow panel member Dr Aileen O’Brien said intervention by the Royal College was “concerning”. “Usually you would have expected that to be an editorial decision,” she said.Some panel members have expressed concern that legal threats may have influenced the College’s actions. When the British Journal of Psychiatry told Prof Coleman they wanted to put a notice on her article to raise awareness about a possible problem, her lawyers responded that any such notice would cause “serious harm and direct damage to her reputation”. The letter, seen as part of an investigation by Newsnight and the BMJ, said Prof Coleman would take “any and all legal options available”.Second legal letterA second legal letter, sent a month later, repeated the threat, if the journal was to retract the paper. Ultimately no notice of concern was placed on the work. Prof Coleman has started legal action against another journal, Frontiers in Psychology, after it retracted one of her earlier papers. So far those actions have been rejected by a Swiss court. Dr Tsai said the row risked undermining confidence in the journal’s ability to “police the content that it publishes”, adding: “[A] journal that does not uphold editorial independence is probably not long for this world.” Newsnight approached Prof Coleman for comment. In reply, she supplied details of her career qualifications, as well as material that she said supported her research.Prof Coleman said she had published 63 peer-reviewed journal articles, with the majority related to the psychology of abortion. Based on this, she often serves as an expert in civil cases involving abortion. She said her career had spanned three decades with publications in highly reputable academic journals and that criticism of her work was driven by the political nature of the topic.A spokesperson for the Royal College of Psychiatrists did not address questions about whether the threat of legal action had influenced its decision. They said: “After careful consideration, given the distance in time since the original article was published, the widely available public debate on the paper – including the letters of complaint already available alongside the article online, and the fact that the article has already been subject to a full investigation – it has been decided to reject the request for the article to be retracted.”More on this storyThe woman who wants to end abortion in AmericaPublished24 JuneFour ways the end of Roe v Wade has changed AmericaPublished24 June

Scripps Research scientists have shown that analyzing a certain type of immune cell in the blood can help identify people at risk of developing type 1 diabetes, a life-threatening autoimmune disease. The new approach, if validated in further studies, could be used to select suitable patients for treatment that stops the autoimmune process — making type 1 diabetes a preventable condition.
In the study, which appeared in Science Translational Medicine on July 5, 2023, the researchers isolated T cells (a type of immune cell) from mouse and human blood samples. By analyzing the T cells that can cause type 1 diabetes, they were able to distinguish the at-risk patients who had active autoimmunity from those who had no significant autoimmunity — with 100% accuracy in a small sample.
“These findings represent a big step forward because they offer the possibility of catching this autoimmune process while there is still time to prevent or greatly delay diabetes,” says study senior author Luc Teyton, MD, PhD, professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research.
The study’s first authors were graduate student Siddhartha Sharma and research assistants Josh Boyer and Xuqian Tan, all of the Teyton lab at the time of the study.
Type 1 diabetes occurs when the immune system destroys the insulin-producing “islet cells” of the pancreas. The autoimmune process that underlies type 1 diabetes can occur over years, with multiple starts and stops. Exactly how the process begins is not well understood, though it is known to involve genetic factors and may be triggered by routine viral infections. When it occurs, it usually does so in childhood or early adulthood, and requires lifelong insulin replacement. Researchers estimate that about two million people have type 1 diabetes in the U.S. alone.
In 2022, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration approved an immune-suppressing therapy that can protect islet cells and at least delay diabetes onset by months to years if given in the early stages of autoimmunity. However, doctors have not had a good method for identifying people who could benefit from such treatment. They have traditionally examined levels of anti-islet antibodies in patient blood samples, but this antibody response has not been a very accurate measure of autoimmune progression.
“Anti-islet antibody levels are poorly predictive at the individual level, and type 1 diabetes is fundamentally a T cell-driven disease,” Teyton says.

Most mothers who took prescription antiseizure medications during pregnancy can breathe a sigh of relief: A new study published today in Lancet Neurology found that young children who were exposed to commonly-prescribed medications in utero do not have worse neurodevelopmental outcomes than children of healthy women.
Commonly used antiseizure medications such as lamotrigine and levetiracetam are generally considered effective and safe, especially compared to many first-generation epilepsy treatments that carried profound risks to the unborn child. But while epilepsy may no longer be the reason that prevents someone from starting a family, there is still not enough information about how drugs taken by the mother affect maternal and child outcomes after delivery.
The new study provides reassurance to patients and offers guidance to neurologists who are faced with a challenge of maintaining fragile balance between prescribing drug dosages that suppress mother’s seizures but carry no increased risks of neurological complications for the baby.
“A blanket saying that all antiseizure medications are bad is overly simplistic and doesn’t make sense biologically,” said senior author Page Pennell, M.D., professor and chair of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh. “Being able to say that no, taking these medications will not put their future child at a greater risk of autism or learning disabilities, has a huge impact for women with epilepsy who are considering pregnancy.”
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder of abnormal electrical activity in the brain that affects over one million American women of childbearing age. With its sudden and debilitating seizures and limited number of medications, which caused significant risks to the developing fetus, the condition was considered incompatible with pregnancy for much of the 20th century, though that landscape is gradually changing.
The Maternal Outcomes and Neurodevelopmental Effects of Antiepileptic Drugs (MONEAD) study was launched two decades ago with the goal of delivering high-quality information about how antiseizure medications affect both the mother and the child. The prospective observational study recruited women who were treated for epilepsy at twenty medical centers across the United States and followed them and their babies over the course of pregnancy and several years postpartum.
Previous research that has come out from the study highlighted the need to carefully monitor and adjust the dosage of antiseizure medications to achieve adequate control of seizures without compromising the health of the fetus. The new study focused on determining whether exposure to these drugs causes long-term neurodevelopmental effects that negatively affect the child.

Higher levels of vitamin B-related amino acids may be linked to the risk of dementia associated with a certain type of air pollutants called particulate matter, according to a study published in the July 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that pollution or amino acids cause dementia, but it suggests a possible link among them.
Researchers looked at fine particulate matter, PM2.5, which consists of pollutant particles of less than 2.5 microns in diameter suspended in air. They also looked at two amino acids, methionine and homocysteine. Methionine is an essential amino acid found in foods such as meat, fish, dairy, beans and eggs and is involved in normal brain functions. Homocysteine is an amino acid produced in the cells that can be transformed to methionine through a reaction that requires both vitamin B12 and folate, a nutrient important in red blood cell formation and for healthy cell growth and function.
“Previous studies have found a link between air pollution and dementia risk, but we don’t have a good understanding of the mechanisms through which air pollution impacts the brain,” said study author Giulia Grande, MD, PhD, of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. “In this study, we found that two types of vitamin B-related amino acids played a role in increasing or decreasing the risk of dementia caused by air pollution.”
For the study, over 2,500 adults with an average age of 73 living in central Stockholm were followed for up to 12 years. Of these, 376 people developed dementia.
Participants completed interviews and blood tests, along with questionnaires on physical activity and diet habits.
Researchers then calculated annual average levels of PM2.5 at the home addresses of the participants. The people who developed dementia had an average exposure to PM2.5 pollution of 8.4 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3), compared to 8.3 µg/m3 for the people who did not develop dementia. These annual average level of PM2.5 are low compared to the average levels of PM2.5 in the rest of Europe, which is 13.8 ?g/m3.
After adjusting for several factors that affect a person’s risk of dementia including age, sex, smoking, and education, researchers found that the risk of dementia increased by 70% for every one µg/m3 increase of PM2.5 exposure during the five years before the start of the study.

People who start taking medication soon after the first signs of multiple sclerosis (MS) may have a lower risk of disability later, according to a study published in the July 19, 2023, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
MS is a disease in which the body’s immune system attacks myelin, the fatty white substance that insulates and protects the nerves. Symptoms of MS may include fatigue, numbness, tingling or difficulty walking.
“When it comes to MS treatment, the earlier the better,” said study author Alvaro Cobo-Calvo, MD, PhD, of the Multiple Sclerosis Center of Catalonia and the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. “Our study found that starting treatment within six months after the first symptoms is associated with a lower risk of disability over time.”
For the study, researchers looked at 580 people with a first episode of symptoms, such as tingling, numbness, muscle weakness or problems with balance, who received at least one disease-modifying drug.
Researchers divided participants into three groups: 194 people who had their first treatment with an MS drug within six months after the first episode of symptoms, 192 people who had first treatment between six months and 16 months, and 194 people who had first treatment after more than 16 months.
Researchers monitored people’s disability levels and brain scans for damage to the brain and spinal cord from the disease for an average of 11 years. Disability scores ranged from zero to 10, with higher scores indicating more disability.
The earliest treatment group had a 45% lower risk of reaching a disability score of three by the end of the study than those in the latest treatment group. A score of three indicates people can still walk unassisted but have moderate disability in one of eight areas, such as motor function, vision or thinking skills, or mild disability in three or four areas. A total of 42 people in the earliest treatment group, or 23%, reached a score of three, compared to 75 people, or 43%, in the latest treatment group.

Published20 JulyShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, EPABy Jim ReedBBC NewsThe first phase of the Covid Inquiry has heard from its final witness.In total, 69 politicians, civil servants, scientists and other experts have been asked about the UK’s planning for a pandemic and the state of the healthcare system when Covid struck.Baroness Hallett and her team will now write up their findings, with an interim report expected in 2024. Here are six questions which they might try to answer, based on the past six weeks of evidence and testimony.WATCH: The Covid Inquiry key moments on BBC iPlayerLISTEN: The Covid Inquiry Podcast on BBC SoundsToo focused on flu? The inquiry heard that much of the planning for a pandemic was based on a 2011 document drawn up in case there was an outbreak of a new, more deadly form of influenza. Former Prime Minister David Cameron said that “group think” meant the government did not properly consider the risk of other viruses, with different rates of transmission and other characteristics. “This is so important – so many consequences followed from that,” he said.Typically, health authorities do not try to contain seasonal flu – instead relying on antiviral drugs and the flu jab, which could be adjusted to tackle a new pandemic form of the virus.Image source, EPAOther witnesses, including Dame Jenny Harries, the chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), appeared to contradict Mr Cameron, describing the government’s flu plan as “actually pretty good”. Matt Hancock, former health secretary, meanwhile, said the bigger, more damaging mistake was the widespread assumption that Covid could not be stopped or contained when it started to spread. He said authorities were too narrowly focused on planning for the fallout, such as “can we buy enough body bags?”.”That was completely wrong,” he added.Lessons from Asia?Other countries managed more effectively to suppress the initial wave of Covid than the UK, reducing the number of deaths and – in some cases – avoiding strict lockdowns. Witnesses, including former health secretary and current Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, told the inquiry that the UK did not learn lessons from Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, which had seen earlier outbreaks of two other coronaviruses – Sars and Mers. In those countries, faster contact-tracing and quarantine policies were subsequently deployed to promptly isolate cases and clamp down when Covid first emerged.In the UK, the civil service had previously run a mock-up training day – codenamed Exercise Alice – in 2016, in preparation for a major outbreak of the Mers virus.But the inquiry heard many of its recommendations, including advice to scale up testing capacity and examine different options for isolation, were not followed through. This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.Did earlier austerity policies inflict damage? Another major theme was the strength – or resilience – of the healthcare system when Covid emerged in 2020. England’s former chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, was heavily critical of the state of the NHS at the time of the outbreak, saying it had been “divested” – with fewer doctors, nurses, beds and ventilators than similar countries.Academics Sir Michael Marmot and Clare Bambra produced a report stating that poorer regions and ethnic minority groups were disproportionally affected by a decade of austerity policies, with the UK entering the pandemic with “depleted” public services and rising inequality.Giving his evidence, George Osborne, who was chancellor from 2010 to 2016, said he “completely rejected” that description. “If we had not had a clear plan to put the public finances on a sustainable path, then Britain might have experienced a financial crisis [and] would not have had the fiscal space to deal with coronavirus when it hit,” he argued.What about the impact of Brexit? From 2018, government departments were being asked to step up planning for a so-called ‘no-deal Brexit’, under the codename Operation Yellowhammer. According to documents seen by the inquiry, a number of internal ‘workstreams’ in the Department of Health related to pandemic planning were therefore paused, or slowed, as staff were moved and other tasks prioritised.That paused work included plans to better prepare the adult social care sector for a severe influenza pandemic.The Pandemic Flu Readiness Board, a cross-government body made up of civil servants from across Whitehall, did not meet for a whole year up to November 2019 because their work was “reprioritised” to plan for leaving the EU without a trade deal. Image source, EPAScotland’s former first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, told the inquiry that the Scottish government was “not at all happy” about having to divert “time, energy and resources” in this way. But Conservative cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Oliver Dowden, both said that no-deal planning had increased staffing, compelled departments to work more closely together and secured supply chains for medical supplies. Additionally, Matt Hancock claimed that work on a no-deal exit was instrumental in preventing the UK running out of some intensive care drugs at the peak of the first wave of Covid.Better front-line planning? The inquiry also heard moving evidence from the families of some of those who lost their lives to Covid.This video can not be playedTo play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser.Anna-Louise Marsh-Rees’s father, Ian, contracted the virus while being treated in hospital in Abergavenny for a gall bladder infection.Jane Morrison spoke about the loss of her wife, Jacky, who died in hospital in Dundee after being admitted for another unrelated condition – jaundice.Groups representing bereaved family members said poor infection control was a “glaring flaw” in hospital planning. They also described the handling of funerals – and how they were conducted during the pandemic – as traumatic, with relatives often unable to say a proper goodbye to loved ones. Image source, ReutersWhy wasn’t a lockdown planned for?Witnesses described national lockdowns as the most “extraordinary” policy of the pandemic. The political decisions which led to nationwide lockdowns will be explored in detail during the inquiry’s second phase in October. Already though, we know a strict lockdown – with widespread school and business closures – was never planned for in advance.Matt Hancock said there was “no prep for how to do one, no work on how best to lock down with the least damage”. England’s chief medical officer, Sir Chris Whitty, suggested it would have been near impossible for scientific advisers to plan in advance for something so radical without being asked to by a senior politician.The inquiry team will try to answer why – given it is the government’s job to consider these things – the longer term impacts of lockdown were not properly thought through before 2020.You can follow Jim on twitter and threads.Covid Inquiry: Were We PreparedWatch on iPlayer: Jim Reed looks at the key moments from the first part of the Covid inquiry.Available now on BBC iPlayer (UK only)More on this storyCovid inquiry: The UK pandemic in numbersPublished5 JulyWhat is the UK Covid inquiry and how does it work?Published1 hour agoRelated Internet LinksUK Covid-19 InquiryThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

Published55 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Nick TriggleHealth correspondentA 48-hour strike by senior hospital doctors in England will get under way early on Thursday, with NHS bosses warning of severe disruption.Thousands of consultants will walkout from 07:00 BST in a dispute over pay.It will be the first time consultants have taken part in strike action since 2012.Only emergency care and a small amount of routine work- so-called Christmas Day cover – will be provided.It comes just two days after a five-day walkout by junior doctors came to an end, on Tuesday. NHS England said that the timing of the industrial action had left hospitals with little time to recover, claiming the senior-doctor walkout would have the most severe impact of any strike action so far this year. Thousands of planned appointments have been postponed. Consultants will stop seeing many patients and will not be around to supervise the work of junior doctors.British Medical Association consultants’ committee chair, Dr Vishal Sharma, said members were “angry” and at “rock bottom” thanks to years of below-inflation pay rises. “We are under-valued and over-worked. This government is failing us and failing patients.”But Health Secretary Steve Barclay urged the profession to end the dispute.He said the government had listened to their concerns, by increasing the amount that can be paid directly into pension pots tax-free, as well as accepting the recommendations of the independent pay review body and giving consultants a 6% pay rise this year.He stressed it was the government’s “final offer”, adding: “It is now time to put patients first.”What do patients need to know?On the strike days, people should use 999 in life-threatening emergencies, and NHS 111 online for other health concerns. GP services and pharmacies can also be accessed in the normal way. Those not told their appointments have been postponed should attend as normal.How much do consultants get paid?The 6% pay increase means basic pay starts at £93,666 – with the most experienced consultants receiving more than £126,000 a year – but to reach that salary takes, on average, 19 years in the role.However, the average NHS consultant earns approximately 30% more than their stated salary – about half of this is for working additional hours, with the rest made up of other allowances – including a bonus system known as clinical excellence awards.They can also be paid additionally for private work – but not all do it. Has pay fallen over time?Yes, but depending on what measure is used the scale of the cut in pay varies.The BMA uses the RPI measure of inflation, which shows, since 2008, pay has fallen by 27%.Once changes to tax and pensions over this period are factored in, the shortfall in take-home pay is 35%, the BMA says. But work by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, using other measures of inflation, shows the fall since 2010 is around 17%. This drop in pay is greater than most other NHS workers, such as nurses, ambulance staff and estates staff, with lower-paid staff prioritised for the biggest pay rises.The BMA said it means consultants have seen their pay eroded when compared to professions such as law, accountancy, financial services and engineering.Unlike the junior-doctors’ dispute, consultants are not asking for full pay restoration in one uplift. Instead, they want the government to start giving pay rises that at least match inflation.Consultants plan more industrial action, on 24 and 25 August, unless a pay deal is agreed.More on this storyNHS consultants in England announce more strikesPublished3 days agoPay rise announced as junior doctors strikePublished6 days ago

An expert panel found fault, but not misconduct, in several neuroscience papers by Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Here are the details.Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a renowned neuroscientist, announced on Wednesday that he would step down from his position as president of Stanford University, after the release of an external review of his scientific work found fault with several high-profile journal articles published under his purview.A committee drafted the review in response to allegations that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was involved in scientific misconduct. Five well-known biologists and neuroscientists were on the committee, including Randy Schekman, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, and Shirley Tilghman, who served as president of Princeton University from 2001 to 2013. In its report, which focused on 12 academic papers, the committee said there was no evidence that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had knowingly falsified data or withheld such information from the public.But the committee noted that “multiple members of Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s labs over the years appear to have manipulated research data and/or fallen short of accepted scientific practices,” pointing out multiple errors in the five papers for which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had led or overseen the research. In response, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne vowed to retract three of the five articles, request major corrections for two and step down from his position as president.“I am gratified that the panel concluded I did not engage in any fraud or falsification of scientific data,” Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement, adding: “Although I was unaware of these issues, I want to be clear that I take responsibility for the work of my lab members.”What were the allegations?In 2015, numerous concerns were raised on the website PubPeer regarding the image data published in three papers — one in the journal Cell in 1999 and two in the journal Science in 2001 — on which Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had served as a lead author. The concerns varied, pointing out what appeared to be the digital editing and manipulation of image backgrounds, the duplication of particular images and the creation of composite images that obscured the purity of the scientific data.These concerns were revisited in 2022 by several media outlets, including Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, which cast further scrutiny on Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s research. The outlets drew attention to images in more than a dozen different papers that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had worked on. Although some images seemed to have had little impact on the results of the studies, others appeared to have substantively affected the findings.As a result, Stanford’s board of trustees opened an investigation into Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s scientific work and organized the five-member expert panel to review the allegations.In early 2023, The Stanford Daily published further allegations that, in 2009, when Dr. Tessier-Lavigne was working as an executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, he had published a paper in the journal Nature that contained falsified data. Relying on unnamed sources, the student newspaper suggested that a research review committee had conducted an internal investigation at Genentech into the 2009 paper and found evidence of data falsification. The Stanford Daily also suggested that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had been made aware of these issues but prevented them from being released to the public.Dr. Tessier-Lavigne strongly denied the allegations.“I am gratified that the panel concluded I did not engage in any fraud or falsification of scientific data,” Dr. Tessier-Lavigne said.Carolyn Fong for The New York TimesWas there fraud?After meeting 50 times and collecting 50,000 documents, the five-member expert panel released its findings on Wednesday. It concluded that, although there was image manipulation and evidence of methodological carelessness in each of the papers it examined, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had not engaged in any of this himself and had not “knowingly countenanced others doing so.”He was also absolved of the most serious allegation: data falsification in his 2009 Nature paper. The committee noted that the research “lacked the rigor expected for a paper of such potential consequence” and determined that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne could have been more forthright about the paper’s shortcomings, but it concluded that the allegations of fraud were false.In the paper, the researchers claimed to have found a chain reaction of brain proteins, including one called Death Receptor 6, that contributed to the development of Alzheimer’s disease. If the research held up, it promised to present a new avenue for a better understanding and treatment of the disease.“There was some excitement that this could have been an alternative way of thinking about the disease,” said Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt University.However, further research — some published by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s lab — found that the experiments highlighting the role of the DR6 chain reaction in Alzheimer’s did not prove what was claimed. This was true, in part, because of unforeseen side effects of the inhibitors that were used in the experiments, as well as impurities in the proteins that were used.The expert panel suggested that, instead of publishing more articles that disproved the results of the 2009 paper, Dr. Tessier-Lavigne could have issued a direct correction or retraction. But the report determined that the allegations of fraud, first published in The Stanford Daily based on the testimony of largely unnamed sources (some of whom the committee was unable to identify), conflated an unrelated instance of scientific misconduct in Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s laboratory with the 2009 paper.Dr. Schrag, who found images that looked to be duplicates in the 2009 study and flagged them publicly in February, said that the study simply was not rigorous enough. “The quality of the work was not high,” said Dr. Schrag, stressing that he was speaking for himself and not his university.What is ‘image manipulation’?Of the 12 papers the expert committee reviewed, it found “manipulation of research data” in nearly all of them. According to the report, such manipulation constitutes a range of practices, including digitally altering images, splicing panels, using data from unrelated experiments, duplicating data and digitally altering the appearance of proteins. But the committee granted that some of the examples of manipulation could have been inadvertent, or were perhaps an attempt at a “beautification” of the results.Mike Rossner, president of the biomedical image manipulation consulting company Image Data Integrity, said that he spent 12 years screening manuscripts accepted for publication in The Journal of Cell Biology between 2002 and 2013. He found that around 25 percent of papers “had some sort of manipulation that violated our guidelines and had to be corrected before publication.” In most instances, he said, the issues were inadvertent and didn’t affect the interpretation of the data. But in about 1 percent of cases the paper needed to be pulled.“There is this pattern emerging of this not being as rare as we want to believe that it is,” Dr. Schrag said.Is ‘laboratory culture’ to blame?The many instances of image manipulation prompted the expert committee to speak with postdoctoral researchers who had worked under Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at different times and at different institutions, including Stanford and Genentech.Many praised Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s intellectual acuity and commitment to scientific rigor, but many also described a lab culture that incentivized good results and successful experiments. They felt that the lab, and Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that is, postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that is, postdocs who were unable or struggled to generate such data),” the report noted.The committee determined that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne did not desire this dynamic, but that it may have contributed to the high rate of data manipulation that came out of his labs.Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, who will step down as president on Aug. 31 but will remain a biology professor at Stanford, said in an email to students: “While I continually maintain a critical eye on all the science in my lab, I have also always operated my lab on trust — trust in my students and postdocs, and trust that the data they were presenting to me was real and accurate. Going forward, I will be further tightening controls.”