Tessier-Lavigne resignation shows that running a lab is a full-time job

Administrators who won't give up their labs are hurting themselves and their students

This ran on my blog over at Science.

The recent news that Marc Tessier-Lavigne is stepping down as president of Stanford University following an investigation into practices in his laboratory is sending shock waves across the scientific community. Much will be written about this apparent fall of a scientific superhero who managed to break ground in neuroscience, launch a huge and successful company (Denali Therapeutics), run research for Genentech, and serve as president of both Rockefeller University and Stanford. Kudos likely will be heaped on Theo Baker, a rising sophomore student journalist who boldly triggered the investigation of a scientific titan. Tessier-Lavigne will be blamed for his vigorous and sometimes bombastic denials of scientific misconduct (here, here, and here), which while perhaps technically correct, don’t read well in light of a report that says his lab culture allowed repeated manipulation of research data. But there is another big issue here that is important for science—running a research laboratory is a full-time job and can’t be done effectively when the principal investigator is simultaneously fulfilling a challenging administrative role.

When I became the dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I decided to stop taking new students and postdocs into my lab. It was a frightening experience, because the whole nature of my professional identity was based on research. Still, I knew that I couldn’t provide my research group with the attention they deserved. I had seen many researchers who had taken big administrative jobs struggle with overseeing their research group. Many incidents similar to those involving Tessier-Lavigne arose because the principal investigators were too busy attending to their other high-profile jobs. David Baltimore had to resign as president of Rockefeller University when scientific misconduct in his laboratory was uncovered (he later became the president of the California Institute of Technology, and like Tessier-Lavigne, was not found to have direct knowledge of the misconduct). In a different set of problematic interactions related to research, José Baselga resigned as head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center because he failed to disclose (intentionally or not) industry relationships in papers published by his research group. These examples reflect how tending to a major administrative position and running a laboratory at the same time are simply too much for one person.

It's time for this to stop. Science loves to have its superheroes because it’s much easier to laud an individual than it is to explain the fact that the process of science is never about one person. This creates an enormous temptation for principal investigators to always keep their lab running, in addition to everything else. No one wants their research productivity to stop growing, and for a scientist, it’s hard to give up the research you love and that has come to define you. But a high-profile administrative job is difficult enough in itself (I ought to know). Managing personnel issues, public relations, board relationships, compliance, student conduct, and many other things while also making sure that the laboratory has a generative culture that leads to robust findings is daunting. And it’s a massive injustice to the laboratory trainees who deserve excellent mentorship.

University search committees can fix this. A fair interview question is: “Do you plan to keep your lab going while you handle this other job?” If the answer is yes, proceed with caution, if at all.