Finis Origine Pendet (The End Depends On The Beginning)
By
Leonard Zwelling
The book is entitled “How To Rule The World.” No, it is not a new book by Donald Trump. It is a true story by Theo Baker who, as a freshman at Stanford, working as a reporter for The Stanford Daily, the campus newspaper, discovered that the president of Stanford, a distinguished neuroscientist named Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had committed multiple infractions of research misconduct including publishing major papers in high profile journals that were just plain wrong. At every turn, the bureaucracy of Stanford tried to shut Baker down. At every turn he persisted. In the end, his reporting brought down the president and changed Baker’s life forever.
Theo Baker is the son of NY Times reporter Peter Baker and journalist Susan Glasser. He was brought up around journalism, but went to Stanford to become a coder. Things changed.
The book is excellent in every way. It’s a dramatic story with many twists and turns, but the real story is what Stanford has become. Sitting in the middle of Silicon Valley, Stanford is the breeding ground for billion-dollar start-ups and billionaires not yet in their twenties. Some of the freshmen come to the university with the goal of becoming billionaires as their first and only priority. They use their brains, Stanford’s faculty (who try to take a piece of the action of any new start-up), and the proximity of Stanford to venture capital in Palo Alto as springboards to early wealth. Of course, there are always stories like that of Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos who became a billionaire on paper after dropping out of Stanford only to be caught selling “vaporware,” as in no product at all, with her claim of doing multiple lab tests on blood from a pinprick.
Baker captures the free-for-all that is Stanford today because he just graduated this year and he brought down the president in his freshman year.
There is, however, a bigger story and it is one that applies to MD Anderson today, too. That story is that of university hiring boards searching for people to fill major positions doing inadequate due diligence when interviewing candidates. In the case of past MD Anderson president Ron DePinho and that of the current MD Anderson president Peter Pisters, quick phone calls to the campuses they vacated PRIOR to the offer letter being drafted would have revealed unhappy faculty and staff around these two men and the Board of Regents could have moved on. Instead, they were somehow dazzled by poor leadership characteristics and false promises and now MD Anderson is worse off because the people charged with identifying good leaders failed to do so. Perhaps the first order of business should be replacing the members of the UT Board of Regents who appear to know little about either education or medicine.
Stanford too had ample opportunity to know of Tessier-Lavigne’s problems with managing his own laboratory as well as his stubbornness when presented with the truth (he refused to retract the false papers) and aloofness when asked to deal with his own campus’s newspaper (he would not sit for an interview with Baker). Many of the instances of falsification occurred at Tessier-Lavigne’s prior job at Genetech.
As anyone who follows science knows, the incidence of reported misconduct is on the rise. Computer tools like Photoshop have been used to doctor data repeatedly. Pubpeer.com is full of instances of misconduct. Several have been reported about work at MD Anderson, but it’s everywhere. As the Research Integrity Officer at Anderson for 12 years, I looked into several allegations of research misconduct myself. It’s far worse now and my own, personal experience making such an allegation recently has been ignored by the new Research Integrity Officer and the Chief Scientific Officer at Anderson. It’s a pity.
It is my personal belief that many of these instances of misconduct are due to post-docs and graduate students using computer tools to manipulate data to give the lab chief the results he has made clear he wants. The subservient workers, often from other countries, have determined making the lab chief happy is more important than the truth.
If you are interested in the power of journalism to inform, the misuse of power at our academic centers, and the psychology that causes people to do really stupid things, I recommend Baker’s book.
I do hope he stays in journalism. He’s got a real knack for persistence and courage. We cannot have enough of these traits in our print journalists.
I chose the title for this blog from a quote Baker uses that he attributes to his late grandfather. Finis origine pendet—the end depends on the beginning. If the executive hiring boards of Stanford and UT had done their jobs at the beginning, the dreadful endings, at least in the cases of Tessier-Lavigne and DePinho, could have been avoided. Once those board members failed at their job, the end was determined.
I hope the UT Board of Regents does better than it has of late at MD Anderson and at the level of the Chancellor and his minions when next they need to choose a leader for a campus. If the UT Board of Regents continues to do such a poor job vetting their candidates for high offices in the UT System, the end will be preordained. And it won’t be pretty.
