Indy Digest: July 24, 2023
Over the weekend, a friend who knows I’m a Stanford University alum asked me what I thought about the resignation of Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
I smiled. “I’m so proud!” I said. She, not surprisingly, responded with a quizzical look.
My pride comes not from the actions of Tessier-Lavigne, which are actually quite terrible; it comes from the fact that his wrongdoing was uncovered by my college newspaper, The Stanford Daily—in a series of stories by a freshman (!) that show the true power of journalism.
As for what Tessier-Lavigne did, here’s a summary by The New York Times:
Following months of intense scrutiny of his scientific work, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced Wednesday that he would resign as president of Stanford University after an independent review of his research found significant flaws in studies he supervised going back decades.
The review, conducted by an outside panel of scientists, refuted the most serious claim involving Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s work—that an important 2009 Alzheimer’s study was the subject of an investigation that found falsified data and that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had covered it up.
The panel concluded that the claims “appear to be mistaken” and that there was no evidence of falsified data or that Dr. Tessier-Lavigne had otherwise engaged in fraud.
But the review also stated that the 2009 study, conducted while he was an executive at the biotech company Genentech, had “multiple problems” and “fell below customary standards of scientific rigor and process,” especially for such a potentially important paper.
It takes that New York Times story 13 paragraphs to get to an explanation of how this all came to light: “The accusations against Dr. Tessier-Lavigne, 63, had first surfaced years ago on PubPeer, an online crowdsourcing site for publishing and discussing scientific work. But they resurfaced after the student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, published a series of articles questioning the work produced in laboratories overseen by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne.”
Those articles were exhaustively researched and written by a kid named Theo Baker. I say “kid,” because he literally was 17 years old when he started the series of articles for The Stanford Daily, according to an interview with Baker done by the Los Angeles Times.
In that interview, Baker explained that when he learned about the accusations on PubPeer about Tessier-Lavigne, he decided to take a closer look. Baker said: “People there suspected that certain images in things that Tessier-Lavigne had published over the years looked like they’d been Photoshopped. I decided, well, if this is true, this is really interesting. I’m going to take this to an actual forensic image analyst who can take a look and say if there has been manipulation or Photoshopping. … Elisabeth Bik is the foremost research misconduct investigator of this type in the entire world. She is eagle-eyed, she is professional, and she—unlike a lot of her colleagues—was willing to speak on the record from the start.”
After The Daily began publishing Baker’s stories, he and the paper became the subject of legal threats by Tessier-Lavigne. But Baker kept going. When Stanford announced its Board of Trustees would form a committee to investigate, Baker reported on the fact that, as he explains to the Los Angeles Times, “one member of the committee (fund manager Felix Baker) had an $18-million investment in Tessier-Lavigne’s biotechnology company—and this is a person who had been appointed to investigate Tessier-Lavigne.” Damn.
What Tessier-Lavigne did was awful. He brought dishonor to an amazing institution I love dearly, and he’s terribly muddled the science around Alzheimer’s disease. That makes me angry. But I can’t help but smile about the accomplishments of Theo Baker and The Stanford Daily.
—Jimmy Boegle
From the Independent
Peachy in Pink: ‘Barbie’ Is the Wonderful Summer Comedy We All Needed
By Bob Grimm
July 24th, 2023
Barbie starts strong; the jokes come fast; and they never let up. Your mind will be blown by cleverness while having your heartstrings tugged more than once.
Restaurant News Bites: Go Taste Summer in Rancho Mirage; Luchow’s Closes Again; and More!
By Charles Drabkin
July 24th, 2023
Mr. Clamato opens in Coachella; Clamatos opens in Palm Springs (unrelated!); Sumo Dog arrives in Indio; and much more!
A Long Lesson: ‘Oppenheimer’ Is Star-Packed, Well-Acted, Good-Looking—and a Bit Bloated
By Bob Grimm
July 24th, 2023
Oppenheimer is a good, if not great, movie that hits all of the basic biopic notes, with a couple of twists and a few shocker scenes to keep you on your toes.
More News
• The Temecula school board has backed down—somewhat—in its battle with the state and Gov. Gavin Newsom over a social-studies curriculum. The Los Angeles Times reports: “A conservative Riverside County school board that had previously rejected a social studies curriculum that mentioned gay rights activist Harvey Milk reversed course Friday night and said it would go forward with the instructional materials that meet state standards. The unanimous decision by the Temecula Valley Unified School District followed a series of contentious public meetings and a threat by Gov. Gavin Newsom to fine the district $1.5 million if it did not provide its elementary school students with new state-approved social studies books for the coming school year. Under what board members described as a compromise, the district will pull from the curriculum one supplemental lesson—a fourth-grade unit that discusses the gay rights movement—for further review and possible rewriting, according to a video of Friday night’s meeting. Milk is not in the textbook, but his biography appears in materials teachers may draw on or assign to students, according to information provided at the meeting.” The school board is still the subject of a state civil rights investigation.
• When it comes to business intelligence, Elon Musk continues to show he’s … um … we’ll be kind and use the word “unconventional.” First up: He announced over the weekend that he was ditching the name Twitter—one of the most recognizable brands on the planet, and one that even led to the creation of a new verb (“tweet’)—and its bird logo in favor of … an X. NBC News reports: “Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a series of posts that the rebrand is the start of a move to push the app in new directions. … ‘X is the future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,’ she wrote. ‘Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.'” OK, sure.
• One potential problem: Two of Twitter X’s main competitors appear to own the rights to use “X” as a brand. The Messenger says: “The biggest obstacle in the way of Twitter’s rebrand may be the fact that both Microsoft and Meta hold trademarks on the use of the letter X as a brand identity used for social media and communications purposes. Microsoft’s trademark application on the brand mark ‘X’ was filed all the way back in 2003 and last renewed on July 18, 2023. … For context, a document filed in December in support of the trademark branding was an advertisement for Xbox Community services. Meta’s trademark use on ‘X,’ which includes initial documentation from Microsoft filed in 2017, is more encompassing. The trademark ‘X,’ which is stylized as a white and blue symbol, is trademarked to brand a wide array of uses, including but not limited to streaming of video and audio content, ‘providing online forums for transmission of messages among computer users,’ and ‘providing internet chat rooms.’ These are also services offered by Twitter. The company also claimed the right to use X for audio broadcasting, which is similar to the Twitter Spaces feature.” Somewhere right now, lawyers are licking their chops.
• Palm Springs Mayor Grace Garner appeared on ABC’s This Week yesterday to talk extreme heat and climate change. If you missed it, here’s the video. If you’re more of a reader, here’s the transcript. Key quote from Garner: “What I’m concerned about is the rest of the country, the rest of the world who is experiencing this extreme heat for the very first time. When your body isn’t used to these high temperatures, it can go into a shock. So if we don’t act now, if we don’t make sure that we’re putting in … the actions that we need to reduce the impacts of climate change, we are just going to see this get worse and worse.”
• The New York Times published a piece headlined: “How a Drugmaker Profited by Slow-Walking a Promising HIV Therapy: Gilead delayed a new version of a drug, allowing it to extend the patent life of a blockbuster line of medications, internal documents show.” A snippet: “The ‘patent extension strategy,’ as the Gilead documents repeatedly called it, would allow the company to keep prices high for its tenofovir-based drugs. Gilead could switch patients to its new drug just before cheap generics hit the market. By putting tenofovir on a path to remain a moneymaking juggernaut for decades, the strategy was potentially worth billions of dollars. Gilead ended up introducing a version of the new treatment in 2015, nearly a decade after it might have become available if the company had not paused development in 2004. Its patents now extend until at least 2031. The delayed release of the new treatment is now the subject of state and federal lawsuits in which some 26,000 patients who took Gilead’s older HIV drugs claim that the company unnecessarily exposed them to kidney and bone problems.” Truvada is the older version; Descovy is the newer one. For what it’s worth, Gilead denies the allegations.
• This headline, by our partners at Calmatters, is attention-grabbing: “How California is fighting meth with gift cards.” What? The story says: “This model, known as ‘contingency management,’ rewards people (in drug-treatment programs) with financial incentives each time their drug tests are negative for stimulants. It’s been shown to have success in clinical trials—and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has been using it for more than a decade—but it hasn’t taken off in California. Medicaid previously wouldn’t cover it, so there was no funding to expand its use.”
• And finally … if you bought cookies at Trader Joe’s recently, well, hold off on eating them until you read this piece from SFGate: “Trader Joe’s cookie lovers, beware of some extra crunchy cookies. On July 21, Trader Joe’s sent a recall notice to customers alerting them of two products that may contain foreign material: rocks. The items in question are the Almond Windmill Cookies and the Dark Chocolate Chunk and Almond Cookies. Both types of cookies are intended to get their satisfying crunch from the edible ingredient of almonds, not rocks. Almond Windmill Cookies with a sell by date of Oct. 19, 2023, through Oct. 21, 2023, or Dark Chocolate Chunk and Almond Cookies with a sell by date of Oct. 17, 2023, through October 21, 2023, should not be eaten.”
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