STORY – Author of a reference article in 2006, Sylvain Lesné would have manipulated many figures in his work.
A promising drug carried by a young pharmaceutical laboratory; a scientist who sets out to investigate suspicious data; and in the end, a possible large-scale fraud uncovered on Alzheimer’s disease: these are the ingredients of the extraordinary story revealed this week by the magazine Science. With in the role of the investigator, Matthew Schrag, assistant professor at Vanderbilt University (Tennessee, United States) and in that of the alleged forger, Sylvain Lesné, French biologist who went into exile in the United States after his doctorate and now at the head of his own laboratory, The Lesné Laboratory, at the University of Minnesota. Matthew Schrag’s findings threaten “one of the most cited Alzheimer’s disease studies of this century and many related experiments”, advance the magazine Science. In question, an article produced by Sylvain Lesné in 2006 and published in Nature.
The case is complex and starts in 2021, when Matthew Schrag is contacted…