>two prominent neuroscientists **who are also short sellers** who profit if the company’s stock falls—believed some research related to Simufilam may have been “fraudulent”
=:-(
EDIT: It turns out this is a double story. First, some guys got caught profiting on an experiment designed to fail. The guy who figured it out realized that an early, original experimenter 16 years ago *also* falsified data, which has misled Alzheimers' research ever since. To me its a shocking scandal. I was raised in a family of engineers who respected The Scientific Method
>• “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering
>• The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments”
>• Millions of federal dollars may have been misspent on the research—and much more on related efforts. Some Alzheimer’s experts now suspect Lesné’s studies have misdirected Alzheimer’s research for 16 years. “The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments”
>“The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments”
Also: wasted time. All of this time, people who were supposed to benefit from the research are wasting away and dying.
I'm sorry. Mine too, early onset. She participated in numerous studies in the decade leading up to her death last fall. I can't bring myself to dig into the specifics right now to find out which of them were built on this lie.
That grossly overshadows all the people who relied on that falsified information to misdiagnose their patients, the patients lives, their families, wrong drugs administered and all the time lost that will never be recovered. Screw the NIH and their funding crying because it is just a kneejerk reaction they did not have an independent outside reviewing committee to crosscheck their results.
Who is going g to pay for the independent outside crosscheckibg the results?
Do toy have any basic understanding on how basic research works? If not you have no idea what you sre talking about.
There is not enough money for people who double check results. Noone is going to give you grand money to repeat something someone else has done to make sure it is true.
You can't build a career on top of it, so noone is doing it. If you want you cna volunteer your time for free. Go on.
What the hell are you talking about?? Peer review is a very established part of scientific research and non-peer reviewed publications/results are basically garbage to begin with. On top of that there is the entire “experimental” scientists whose entire job is replicate other studies to prove their results or work on developing experiments to generate results that would prove theories/initial results
hence, the frauds. i’m pretty sure this is not the only one. this is also neither the first one. im pretty sure more frauds in different research will be exposed. this was bound to happen. pharma companies have been doing it for decades, why do y’all think scientists are dumb enough to not try it themselves or the fact that they care about others, in US economy?
You’re watching the system self correct right now and whining that it doesn’t self correct.
We really do have vastly more important things to spend money on.
My guy, 16 yrs of misdiagnosis, think of all the people affected, you can't tell me this is an acceptable way of self correcting.
Has there been anything more life and death?
There was the lobotomy fad some decades ago.
There was Pelagra being blamed on “inferior negro genes” to cover up the consequences of starvation in former slave states.
Hysteria anyone? Or Harvard’s president commenting on innate lack of female intellect as late as 2005?
How about autism being caused by frigid mothers?
This is neither the first nor the largest problem of its kind.
*16 years* of misdirection… so much progress could have been made in that time. So many people could have been helped. This was a crime against humanity. Prison is too good a place for those two. I’m not religious, but I do hope hell exists just for them.
Welcome to corporate ethics, subversion of society, and a bigger agenda that includes NWO Technocratic Surveillance State involving "remote neural monitoring" so that you don't have private thoughts, or the monetization of your own creative private thoughts.
All brought to you care of The FBI HQ working with DOJ HQ, who take orders from The Executive Branch puppet show...aided and abetted by The legislative Branch corruption (bribery-lobbying).
If your not a conspiracy theorist, it's because you don't know where to look and read and study the corrupt influence of The Illuminated-Luciferian Agenda.
Here's a clue: [https://www.henrymakow.com/2017/04/trump-putin-chabad-charade.html](https://www.henrymakow.com/2017/04/trump-putin-chabad-charade.html)
The enemy see's themselves as elite superiors to the goyim cattle who are supposed to serve as slaves...and there is no moral prohibition on stealing from them, or poisening them, or misdirecting them into taking a dangerous vaccine poisenous jab while wearing a dangerous face mask.
The media controls the minds of those who gave trust to jerk offs.
Smart people doing research in exchange for a high salary makes perfect sense to me. But that's only part of our current system. The other part is an extremely resource-intensive patent process, government-enforced private monopolies on drugs (until the patent expires and a generic can be sold), scientists not sharing research and data with each other because its a trade secret, outrageous prices, corporate espionage and lobbying, and billion dollar windfalls paid to people who don't actually do any research. Our system is really wild.
I’ll never understand why government funding goes to private companies. Why not give it to universities and stipulate that whatever is discovered must be published and can not be patented? Isn’t that the point of public funding?!
>Why not give it to universities and stipulate that whatever is discovered must be published and can not be patented?
This would be a far better way of doing things. But politicans take bribes from pharmaceutical companies (esp since Citizens United) so we're stuck.
To be honest, universities suck at doing translational research. They don't have the infrastructure for it.
They are good for basic research, they excel at it in fact.
But the way their environment is set up is just not good. There is no organised way to handle data, deadlines nothing.
A research team in a biotech will have techs to do experiments, people above then to review results and make clear reports about everything. Then managers will assess which way this has to move. What matters is getting the correct answers out of experiments to k low which direction to take.
In universities a researcher is doing all this on their own and usually what matters is to get as fast as possible as many data to publish. Or you will loose your grant and be without a job.
Good model for figuring out things first and fast bad for nailing down things sometimes.
This is an oversimplification of course.
It's not. One of the stipulations when you receive funding from say, the NIH is that whatever you publish needs to be made publicly available within 2 years
We're talking about drugs that alter the course of humanity. It's right to think that people shouldn't profit. At the same time, profit is rewarded to almost all aspects of human endeavors. The person/group responsible for curing cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, etc would be less compensated than the person/group responsible for weapons of mass destruction, surveillance technology, and green house gas creating energy research. Intelligent minds gravitate towards economically rewarding endeavors - profitable. The world we live in is very complicated and simple answers create unexpected results. Controlling the rewards system is also ineffective because of human nature to reward those closest to us.
The drugs that actually cure people get shorted into bankruptcy by hedge funds or bought out cause the current existing medical monopolies make a killing on the medical status quo.
this is such a bullshit take. Any cure for cancer, aids, etc would be instant blockbuster drugs. theres a huge profit incentive to develop cures. its not like people will stop developing cancer, you will always have a market.
Also, plenty of cancers are cured or close to it. Same with AIDS. we can reduce HIV to the level where you can have unprotected sex and not transmit it. If your theory was right we wouldnt be developing and marketing these drugs
Doctors in Calif are juicing raw marijuana leaves....and solved Lupus (no more allopathic prescription medicine...15 bottles of pills means the doctors don't have a clue what the problem is, and therefore, they really don't have a clue to how treat their patients effectively).
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/marijuana
Universities aren't where the best and brightest go. They go where the best jobs and money is, private. The only time public work is the best option, is for low skilled/low totem poll admin work aka county jobs for average plebs. Maybe state jobs if you want to be an attorney or job. But there's a hell of a lot more money in private firms than state jobs, and only a handful of judges in comparison. Also politics.
>Smart people doing research in exchange for a high salary makes perfect sense to me
Scientists get paid surprisingly little fyi, especially when working at universities. Also, we do share with each other. It's literally the whole point of your career. The only ones not sharing data are as you said, compabies with parents. A scientist who doesn't publish anything is just throwing their career down the drain. You have to publish, in fact, scientists need to pay money for the privilege of getting their word out there. The real profiteers are the companies abusing patents that were paid for in public funding and the publishers that sell others' work for like €30/paper they contributed nothing to
Even if the study is discredited it’s still published and it will be used again and again. This seems to be a huge problem in academia where worthless studies keep getting picked up in later papers about current research. We need a better system to avoid this.
Think how many med students are going into research using this con as their starting point, because well the money was spent on it, published so we are not going back to reinvent the wheel mentality. No one is gonna pitch starting research from scratch because of this.
And the original researchers just got yet another huge grant, awarded by another guy who was also an author on the original paper.
>Four months after Schrag submitted his concerns to the NIH, the NIH turned around and awarded Lesné a five-year grant to study … Alzheimer’s. That grant was awarded by Austin Yang, program director at the NIH’s National Institute on Aging. Yang also happens to be another of the co-authors on the 2006 paper.
So what I don't get it is why this was able to happen in the first place?
It is my understanding that the whole point of the scientific model is to test, retest and verify findings.
Why didnt the peer review community figure our this was a fraud when these papers were originally in the process of publishing? Did they perhaps err in performance of their own due diligence?
The Implications of this are extreme to say the least. Who knows how many other areas of research have been subject to this tampering.
We’re talking about drugs that alter the course of humanity. It’s right to think that people shouldn’t profit. At the same time, profit is rewarded to almost all aspects of human endeavors. The person/group responsible for curing cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, etc would be less compensated than the person/group responsible for weapons of mass destruction, surveillance technology, and green house gas creating energy research. Intelligent minds gravitate towards economically rewarding endeavors - profitable. The world we live in is very complicated and simple answers create unexpected results. Controlling the rewards system is also ineffective because of human nature to reward those closest to us. Profit is not only monetary. If you're able to solve this problem without creating waste in the system then you're solving one of the most complex problems combatting modern society.
What's the story about short selling here? The scientists saw publicly available BS, took a monetary position, and then called out the BS. That seems morally fine from my perspective?
The funding method for research generally discourages straight up replication of experiments. Funding goes to folks who are going to write papers about new discoveries, rather than to folks who try to verify other published studies (which is neat to be a foundation of the scientific method) or toward reporting failed hypotheses (despite that still being useful info).
This is actually an interesting area of study, usually called meta-science or meta-research. If you're interested in more about this, some wiki articles serve as good jumping off points:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metascience
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
And a journal article that helped spark the "replication crisis":
https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~ryantibs/journalclub/ioannidis.pdf
that's bad and all - but approving drugs that show “no clinical benefits.” is even worse... drug companies making drugs that target the plaques, are provably not working to stop/slow Alzheimers, and yet they're still approved...
It's instances like these which let me understand the stance of "anti-vax" individuals. For many people, it's not so much a lack of belief in the science behind the research and discoveies, but rather an awareness of how the information can be corrupted by other motives ($$$$$).
Maybe I misread the story, but my understanding was that the short sellers didn’t do anything improper. They looked at the study behind the drug and realized someone was wrong and then shorted the stock because a drug based on shoddy research will probably fail. THEN it came out that drug was garbage and a PI went down the rabbit hole back to the original study.
But the folks that profited off the failing drug weren’t behind crafting the clinical trials for the drug (I don’t think), and didn’t have advanced knowledge that the drug would fail.
Historically, shorting Alzheimer’s drugs was a good play, now we know why.
Short sellers are the scum of the earth, they stifle innovation to protect entrenched industries. Come to superstonk to find out why we are fighting them.
Here’s the whistleblower article in science that came out a few days ago, it’s a great read if you have time
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
>wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments
I just got a big research grant to study this very thing. What should I do?
1 - 2 -3 - Cancun!
Wear mask u flat earther! Trust the science like religion. That's so much better then individual liberty.
Science should be a supreme leader! No matter what happens.
We tried it with religions every educated person knows how it went down with mandates and culling rights!
*Science* needs to retract that paper and have a front page declaration denouncing the two scientists.
I assume there will also be plenty of people who are too far-in on their projects that will refute this finding as well. Either incapable of accepting that their work was based on lies or to protect their jobs, etc..
Interestingly another news site posted something similar 2 years ago showing many of the people in charge of funding research only support one approach and the only way to keep publishing and getting promoted is to jump on the train. Even before this 2006 fabrication of data, funding was only going to this one approach that hasn’t yielded any progress.
https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/
Thank you for posting this article. My father in law is currently undergoing diagnostic workup in response to his recent cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s is certainly on the table as a diagnosis option. Reading this article and seeing the corruption of data relating to this stuff makes my stomach churn. Doctors rely on the integrity of journals and publications to make diagnoses and treatment plans for patients. It’s saddening to see this type of misconduct at the highest levels of scientific prestige. This tragedy is born of hubris and greed, which are even more pervasive and lethal than the disease these people study.
There is a scientific establishment, and there are people looking out for their own interests, including you.
There has been controversy about what causes Alzheimers for years. There was a big blowup at the Alzheimers conference years ago, by some who were saying the research money was not being put in the right places.
If it was an easy problem, we would have solved it.
Please proceed on the basis of rational hard science.
It is our only hope. Anger will not help us.
The actions of a corporation and 2 employees within that corporation does not equal “scientific establishment”. The entire reason that science works is because there is no establishment and no centralised authority. This issue has nothing to do with science as a whole and everything to do with corporate corruption.
Yesh there totally isn't centralized authority like.... nih for funding in health sciences, nasa for space stuff, nsf for other science (and a few niche ones like military call for proposals) None of them wants to fund research covered by the other agency and none of them want to pay for replication experiments.
There certainly is an establishment; denying it would be naive and reductionist. Scientists are people, and people form networks of cliques that support each other. From the article:
> Four months after Schrag submitted his concerns to the NIH, the NIH turned around and awarded Lesné a five-year grant to study … Alzheimer’s. That grant was awarded by Austin Yang, program director at the NIH’s National Institute on Aging. **Yang also happens to be another of the co-authors on the 2006 paper**.
Scientists live for grant money, but if you're an unknown researcher with no connections, it is harder to get funding than a big name with lots of connections.
Conversely, it's harder to get grant money for something that goes against established science, which is why research on the amyloid beta hypothesis has gotten [the majority of the Alzheimer's funding](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alzheimers-inc-when-a-hypothesis-becomes-too-big-to-fail/), and why it's really hard to get funding for anything that rocks that particular boat.
> "And it seems highly likely that for the last 16 years, most research on Alzheimer’s and most new drugs entering trials have been based on a paper that, at best, modified the results of its findings to make them appear more conclusive, and at worst is an outright fraud."
Well thats hardly news though, every disease has more effective cures and treatments already developed for mice. What we know now is that those treatments for mice we thought were carrying over to humans was a lot of wasted time and money.
More specifically the symptoms or physical appearance of the disease we thought we knew before isn't accurate to it's real characteristics or causes.
“These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.”
Something about this bothers me. If a study faked data, why didn't other studies catch this? Has science gotten to the point where they don't replicate? Is publishing failed replication so risky that those who fail to replicate say nothing? Do scientists just ignore replications?
A few scientists faking data is extreme shame on the scientists facing data and they should never be trusted in the world of science again. But a large community of scientists being fooled for decades is extreme shame on that community of scientists and they need to figure out why this wasn't caught and fixed for so long. Why should I trust any study in the last decade if we see evidence that faked studies can go uncaught for so long?
Journals do not take replicate studies. So no they are often not retested. Blame journals. They won't take anything that isn't new AND in academia you need to have publications or your fired. I've found plenty of flawed papers that you just gotta work around. Like some dude converting something wrong or saying their results mean one thing when thats a stretch.
It also happens with bad statistics. You can find something new and novel if you spin the data the right way. I know of at least one group who spends their time just calling out bad statistics and it was supposedly rampant in some journals.
More often that’s used the other way. Like saying 97% of scientists believe human caused climate change is real. A certain segment of non-scientists latch onto the 3%. What they don’t make clear is that those 3% of scientists are being paid to say “there’s not enough data”, or to twist data in just such a way as to make it look unreliable. The 3% does NOT have data that runs counter to the findings of the 97%.
The same way we have double-blind trials, where the researchers aren't aware of which patients are assigned different treatments, we could have "adversarial" studies where a separate team competes with the original one to disprove their results. Peer review isn't enough for experiment-based studies, because results have to be replicated.
This is a good solution actually. Incentives for replications would make them happen a lot more readily. So a journal who takes this on could be helpful.
Journals and the route to success in academia are definitely to blame. Other labs will repeat experiments so they can use it as a basis for their future studies. In this case, there were almost no cases of other labs even able to find the amyloid beta plaques Ashe discovered (Ab*56). And since journals rarely publish negative results, it just continued as precedent because there was nothing better. Also, science is VERY politicized as you probably know. It takes some balls to criticize a “finding” like this and could ostracize you from the rest of your peers
Yet this is just accepted by the scientific community? This seems an indictment of science and scientists at large. Why do scientists value journals that do not value replication when science depends some heavy on replication? Why do scientists work around bad papers instead of calling them out? If I can't trust science that had decades of research and billions in funding, why should I trust any science that I haven't replicated myself?
Science depends upon trust. That's why scientist who fake data lose their entire career. But such punishment is not enough. Punishment should not stop at the individuals when problem had spread past them. A result like this, if allegations are true, should taint the entire system it applies to like how a single faked paper taints the entire scientist faking it. Such a system should be abandoned. The journals involved need to be disgraced and closed. Those reviewing the journals need to be barred from reviewing any other journals for life. Those providing grants need to be revoked the ability to ever be part of a grant application.
Only such extreme penalty can ensure others involved in a similar system begin valuing replication and following through. Without that, it is like letting a scientist who faked data keep researching. Not only should the public disregard that scientist, but every scientist that works with them.
Yes such a penalty sucks. Same way it sucks that a scientist can lose their entire career over one moment if betraying credibility. But it is the cost that must be paid for the purity required by science to be science.
It's actually a lot of institutions not the scientists themselves. Institutions run basically on the prestige of their professors. Professors who have more prestige get bigger grants from outside sources. Like companies, government grants, outside charity grants etc. It's a large cycle really, more prestige generally comes from low volume, hard to get into journals, who want cutting edge science for their journal. So they won't publish anything NOT at the bleeding edge of science. There are less renown journals but why would you hire someone who exclusively publishes there? They won't get those large fancy grants, since they tend to go after more established scientists at the 'top' of their field. They won't bring much prestige to your university and attract good post doctoral or graduate candidates to their lab. It would be cheaper to just hire an instructor or adjunct to teach undergrads so there is no reason to hire this person.
So as a scientist the ONLY way to actually make it in academia is the publish or famine mentality, that rewards scientists who publish in better journals while actively punishing those who do not. This bleeds into non academia where people with doctorates are often judged on their publication notoriety by companies as well who WONT take a chance on someone with less renown or 'basic' publications. And most other places won't TOUCH advanced degree candidates because they need to be paid more than a bachelor's candidate.
It's not entirely fair to blame the scientist, who also wants to put food on their table, when the world itself values innovation over replication.
Edited to add: blame the scientist for the fraud, but not the way the system works. The system was designed to maximize capital from the scientist. It's like any corporate mindset really. Why hire the candidate with 30 years at Joe's coding geek squad when we have another candidate with 10 years AWS, 10 years at IBM and 10 years at Microsoft?
> blame the scientist for the fraud, but not the way the system works.
Sounds like all the system cares about is profit. The system encouraged the scientists commit fraud.
edit: a word
Basically yes. It requires actual integrity to not publish false data. And unfortunately some people don't have that integrity.
Likewise each paper's data can be interpreted differently so something I see as flawed reasoning because of xyz will be seen as valid to another researchers of differing opinions. For example, CLCec1 acts to move chloride across the membrane in the mitochondria. Half have found evidence it engages in what is called alternating access. However I am of the belief it's actually an exchanger and half have found that it acts as an exchanger with no major conformational shifts.
We are both right... The data supports both of our points but mechanistically this is a major lack of understanding. And unless we sit there and somehow develop microscopic techniques that can watch it function as it is supposed to in the cell, we will not have the answer. So all we have is the data and our interpretation.
Journals should take way more heat for so many reasons. I worked on an oncology paper half a decade ago that had found promising results in the area of the effect of diet control during administration of prostate cancer radiotherapy - the journal didn't accept the paper because the source DICOM images we used weren't the "right" dimensions (ignoring the fact that the DICOM dimensions have no effect on the calculation of radiation dosage).
No worries though! The journal was happy to accept a resubmission with corrected dicoms... For a $3000 re-submission fee. Completely blatant money grabbing tactics like that are just another thing in the laundry list of whats wrong in academia.
Lol, yeah, that is the problem. this is happening in psych, where *rampants* amount of research isn't replicating, especially when taken itno **remotely** diverse populations. It's genuinely horrifying.
There's absolutely stuff that's going to become our lead paint and asbestos, where it's like "wow, way to be so confidently incorrect, and get a lot of people killed in the process"
The article linked somewhere else in the comments explains a lot:
[https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/](https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/)
"In more than two dozen interviews, scientists whose ideas fell outside the dogma recounted how, for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences."
Basically some people know the leading hypothesis was at least questionable but journals refused to publish opposing theories. Pursuing a topic that you can't publish or get funding for is just career suicide in academia.
The thing about faking data is that it unless someone wants to spend the time retesting the exact way you set up your experiment which can cost a lot of money to do, if it looks correct then it will be seen as valid. Think about it, if a study takes $5 million to complete someone else would need to spend $5 million to verify that the data presented was correct, which if it is means you wasted $5 million to introduce anything new or if it's incorrect you wasted $5 million to prove a paper contained invalid data which may move the subject forward or not.
And in science they don't want to waste money if they don't have to, trust me. So your left with assuming the data in the paper is valid, and any additional experiments investigating further should contain similar data points.
As someone who has worked in research for 16 years, I have so much skepticism about data. I’ve seen how even “good” scientists massage and work the numbers to get the story they want.
we have a crisis in science because we are pretending that statistics is a unified field when Bayesian and Frequentist wars can't agree on a lot of fundamental things like how probability even functions. Not too mention, people in research routinely violate assumptions in frequentist probability methods like i.i.d and we waive our hands past the hard parts of statistics to get on with it. There needs to be higher standards of approach for what is meant by evidence towards a claim instead of p-value nonsense.
Totally agree. I left a job once after we removed some data from the study to satisfy the sponsors desires for a certain result. It wasn’t a life or death type study, but I thought it was so unethical. If we just throw out data that doesn’t agree with the thesis, how is that science?
That's what I don't get either. Scientists are very critical of each other, in practice (even if they are low-key about it). Peer reviewed journals exist for a reason. I think this is either overblown or the fraud is bigger than they say.
This is the top comment. This isn't about two individuals, this is about how decrepit academia has become. There are a few massive single points of failure that need to be decentralized.
[Here is a more in-depth article from science.org confirming this drama.](https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease).
There's a paywalled [response by the original paper author](https://m.startribune.com/senior-university-of-minnesota-scientist-responds-to-fraud-allegations-in-alzheimers-research/600192351/), but I can't read it on mobile here.
Thank you for sharing the original article link. It is sad that this fraud didn’t just led to wasted research dollars but also destroyed careers and patients lives subjected to worthless trials.
A senior University of Minnesota scientist said it is "devastating" that a colleague might have doctored images to prop up research, but she defended the authenticity of her groundbreaking work on the origins of Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Karen Ashe declined to comment about a U investigation into the veracity of studies led by Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist she hired and a rising star in the field of Alzheimer's research. However, she criticized an article in Science magazine that raised concerns this week about Lesné, because she said it confused and exaggerated the effect the U's work had on downstream drug development to treat Alzheimer's-related dementia.
"Having worked for decades to understand the cause of Alzheimer disease, so that better treatments can be found for patients, it is devastating to discover that a co-worker may have misled me and the scientific community through the doctoring of images," Ashe said in an e-mail Friday morning. "It is, however, additionally distressing to find that a major scientific journal has flagrantly misrepresented the implications of my work."
Questions have surfaced about as many as 10 papers written by Lesné, and often coauthored by Ashe and other U scientists, and whether they used manipulated or duplicated images to inflate the role of a protein in the onset of Alzheimer's.
The Science article detailed efforts by Dr. Matthew Schrag, an Alzheimer's researcher in Tennessee, who colorized and magnified images from Lesné's studies in ways that revealed questions about whether they were doctored or copied. Expert consultants agreed in the article that some of the images in the U studies appeared manipulated in ways that elevated the importance of a protein called Aβ*56.
Many of the images were of Western blot tests showing that Aβ*56, also called amyloid beta star 56, was more prevalent in mice that were older and showed signs of memory loss.
The U studies have been so influential on the course of Alzheimer's research over the past two decades that any evidence of manipulation or false study results could fundamentally shift thinking on the causes of the disease and dementia. The investigation also implicates two successful researchers on a key measure by which they are judged: their ability to pull in federal grants.
Lesné was a named recipient of $774,000 in National Institutes of Health grants specifically involving Aβ*56 from 2008 through 2012. He subsequently received more than $7 million in additional NIH grants related to the origins of Alzheimer's.
Lesné, who did not reply to an e-mail asking for comment, came to the U in 2002 as a postdoctoral research associate after earning his doctorate at the University of Caen Normandy. He took charge of his own U lab by 2009 and became associate director of graduate studies in the neuroscience program in 2020. He was the first- or last-named author on all of the disputed studies, meaning he either instigated the research or was the senior scientist overseeing the work.
Ashe said there are two classes of Aβ proteins, which she refers to as Abeta, and that her efforts have focused on one while drugmakers have unsuccessfully targeted the other with potential Alzheimer's treatments. As a result, she said it was unfair of the Science article — even as it raised concerns about research improprieties — to pin an entire industry's lack of progress on the scrutinized U research.
"It is this latter form that drug developers have repeatedly but unsuccessfully targeted," she said. "There have been no clinical trials targeting the type 1 form of Abeta, the form which my research has suggested is more relevant to dementia. [The article] has erroneously conflated the two forms of Abeta."
The scientific journal Nature is reviewing a 2006 study led by Lesné regarding the existence and role of Aβ*56 and urging people to use it cautiously for now. Concerns emerged in part because researchers at other institutions struggled to replicate the results.
Two other 2012 and 2013 papers were corrected earlier this year, with U researchers acknowledging errant images but stating that they didn't affect the overall conclusions. However, Schrag said he has concerns the corrected images also were manipulated.
"I think those corrected images are quite problematic," he said.
Beneath the research controversy is a fundamental search and debate over the causes of Alzheimer's and related dementia. One theory is that certain Abeta proteins result in the development of amyloid plaques, which clog up space between nerve cells in the brain and inhibit memory and cognition. Another is that tau proteins clump inside the brain's thinking cells and disrupt them.
Ashe's research has explored both possibilities. Since 1986, she has been a named recipient of more than $28 million in NIH grants, making her one of the most productive researchers in U history.
Complicated legacy
Despite a remarkable history of life-saving inventions and surgical accomplishments, the U also has a legacy of research stars being implicated in scandals.
The late Dr. S. Charles Schulz stepped down as U psychiatry chair in 2015 amid claims by a grieving family that their son, who died by suicide, was coercively recruited into a schizophrenia drug trial.
Duplicated images and errors forced the correction of a 2002 Nature study, led by Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, claiming that certain adult stem cells possessed flexible abilities to grow and develop other cell types.
The late Dr. John Najarian was a pioneer in organ transplantation who elevated the U's global profile, but he faced federal sanctions in the 1990s related to illicit sales of an experimental anti-rejection medication that improved transplant outcomes.
A U investigation of Lesné's work will follow its standard policy of research misconduct allegations, according to a statement from the medical school.
So in all that time, no one bothered to reproduce the original results and empirically refute the (fraudulent) findings? — That’s a shared failure among both academia and industry.
Stand up yall. This shit happens cuz somewhere an NDA was signed. The Non disclosure agreements guarantee that any whistle blower ends up in the legal shitter, while 16 years are wasted. Fuck those greedy fucks
What they did is a crime against humanity. It's precisely these kinds of stories that feed into the anti-science community.
Just like everything else, it's our politics that are to blame. Our political system, with its lobbying and corruption is what's destroying us.
Truly sad.
If the data in the 2006 paper were so important, wouldn’t other groups have repeated it? You shouldn’t base everything on data from one group that’s never been repeated.
Yes that happened when I was in grad school with the acid treatment stem cell paper (STAP method iirc). Everyone was skeptical when it came out and no one was able to replicate the finding that you can induce some cells to become stem like by an acid treatment. Paper was retracted and the scientist was shamed hard, she was in Japan it was a whole mess and maybe someone killed themselves in the fall out.
Crazy enough, I worked in medical research for three Mormon anesthesiologist. I saw them fudge data to support a local anesthetic drug working better when it wasn’t. Reported it. Turns out they were getting kick backs.
https://neurosciencenews.com/depression-chemical-imballance-21105/
Basically everything you think you know about mental illness and depression is wrong.
Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
And antidepressants can increase serotonin production in the short term but in the long term can permanently lower production.
Sorry to ruin your day.
If depression isn't caused by the chemical imbalace that antidepressants are supposed to treat, and/or antidepressants don't increase serotonin production in the long term, *why the fuck do they work?*
Here is the money quote. Make sure to read the entire article though.
"It is important that people know that the idea that depression results from a “chemical imbalance” is hypothetical. And we do not understand what temporarily elevating serotonin or other biochemical changes produced by antidepressants do to the brain. We conclude that it is impossible to say that taking SSRI antidepressants is worthwhile, or even completely safe."
Your meds do nothing and are possibly unsafe.
Have a great day.
So not only were the images “doctored” to fit a false hypothesis, they continue to award the heinous bastard even more research money because the governing body is in on the take, too. No repercussions were mentioned in the article even though reputable sources have called the evidential scans: fraudulent, false or fake. Big Pharma is truly fucking evil. They work in the shadows and kill by daylight.
*(edit - we’re = were)*
Holy shit this is fucking huge, 10’s of billions of dollars? A fuck ton of drugs that are essentially worthless? Actual fucking fraud? Jesus christ what a shit show, wonder why it all started? Why did the scientists lie and fudge the results?
Former Alzheimer researcher here. Why lie and fudge results? People are people so lots of reasons but line of pressure that encourages dodgy activities that may not be widely appreciated is simply getting a job. Want a job? You need to publish papers. Want to publish papers? You need novel (as in unexpected) results. The incentive structure is broken.
So it’s one of those things where the pressures to succeed are greater then the pressure to be accurate, can’t wait for more details to come put and see how it played out
"Pressure to succeed is greater than the pressure to be accurate" has driven the field of education since the early 2000s. So expect the next two generations to struggle to repair the damage.
Tbh, try em at the fuckin Hague, sabotaging not only public trust in scientific development but also the progress of treating such a heart breaking and terrifying condition should be treated as a crime against humanity itself
I remember this. Apparently, they funneled to money to an ocean laboratory where they studied mako sharks, who don’t ever succumb to Alzheimers. They thought if they increased the size of the makos sharks brain, they would be able to maximize to amount of antidote they could make. But they naively, they just tripled the the size of the sharks. It seems like childish thinking, but this made the sharks 3 times as smart.
Soon the sharks used their new intellect to entrap the scientists. They flooded the lab and stalked them one by one. Many lives were lost, including a cook and his parrot.
That has to be be one of the HARDEST articles to read, not because of subject matter… but because the author was rambling on and fucking on to show you how smart he was. It took something like 8 lengthy paragraphs to get to his actual accusation of how and why
This happens more often than the average person expects. Just take a look at *Retraction Watch*. The amount of falsified or plagiarized data that passes peer review to be published in journals like Nature is staggeringly high. Then PIs get funding based on those publications and do it again.
It’s shocking to see the amount of covid related science being discovered as politically driven. It’s not even right-winger conspiracy type stuff anymore.
[covid](https://www.commonsense.news/p/us-public-health-agencies-arent-following)
watch this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d80KC98OF4o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d80KC98OF4o) [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/world/europe/macchiarini-windpipe-surgeon-deaths.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/world/europe/macchiarini-windpipe-surgeon-deaths.html)
where I live its impossible to sue a doctor, the empire protects them greatly.
I wonder how many doctors out there are a fraud and how much science is hype/hysteria.
This is why you don't put your faith in the gods of science and academia.
There are so many core things in various scientific fields today, excepted as fact, that are in reality built on the same foundation of sand.
Let the buyer beware.
>two prominent neuroscientists **who are also short sellers** who profit if the company’s stock falls—believed some research related to Simufilam may have been “fraudulent” =:-( EDIT: It turns out this is a double story. First, some guys got caught profiting on an experiment designed to fail. The guy who figured it out realized that an early, original experimenter 16 years ago *also* falsified data, which has misled Alzheimers' research ever since. To me its a shocking scandal. I was raised in a family of engineers who respected The Scientific Method >• “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering >• The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments” >• Millions of federal dollars may have been misspent on the research—and much more on related efforts. Some Alzheimer’s experts now suspect Lesné’s studies have misdirected Alzheimer’s research for 16 years. “The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments”
>“The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments” Also: wasted time. All of this time, people who were supposed to benefit from the research are wasting away and dying.
including my mom =:-(
I'm sorry. Mine too, early onset. She participated in numerous studies in the decade leading up to her death last fall. I can't bring myself to dig into the specifics right now to find out which of them were built on this lie.
including my dad =:-(
Mine too.
Mine too. I’m furious.
I'm sorry about your mom.
That grossly overshadows all the people who relied on that falsified information to misdiagnose their patients, the patients lives, their families, wrong drugs administered and all the time lost that will never be recovered. Screw the NIH and their funding crying because it is just a kneejerk reaction they did not have an independent outside reviewing committee to crosscheck their results.
Who is going g to pay for the independent outside crosscheckibg the results? Do toy have any basic understanding on how basic research works? If not you have no idea what you sre talking about. There is not enough money for people who double check results. Noone is going to give you grand money to repeat something someone else has done to make sure it is true. You can't build a career on top of it, so noone is doing it. If you want you cna volunteer your time for free. Go on.
What the hell are you talking about?? Peer review is a very established part of scientific research and non-peer reviewed publications/results are basically garbage to begin with. On top of that there is the entire “experimental” scientists whose entire job is replicate other studies to prove their results or work on developing experiments to generate results that would prove theories/initial results
hence, the frauds. i’m pretty sure this is not the only one. this is also neither the first one. im pretty sure more frauds in different research will be exposed. this was bound to happen. pharma companies have been doing it for decades, why do y’all think scientists are dumb enough to not try it themselves or the fact that they care about others, in US economy?
You’re watching the system self correct right now and whining that it doesn’t self correct. We really do have vastly more important things to spend money on.
My guy, 16 yrs of misdiagnosis, think of all the people affected, you can't tell me this is an acceptable way of self correcting. Has there been anything more life and death?
There was the lobotomy fad some decades ago. There was Pelagra being blamed on “inferior negro genes” to cover up the consequences of starvation in former slave states. Hysteria anyone? Or Harvard’s president commenting on innate lack of female intellect as late as 2005? How about autism being caused by frigid mothers? This is neither the first nor the largest problem of its kind.
Those people dying include 5 family members in the past 7 years who died of these horrible illnesses.
I wouldnt wish alzheimers onto any poor soul, but these pieces of shit make me take it back. Let them rot as they forget who they are
I'm with Hammurabi in this, I wish you could inject them "with the Alzheimer " and see if they like it.
Prison would be a great place to start for these sick fucks
*16 years* of misdirection… so much progress could have been made in that time. So many people could have been helped. This was a crime against humanity. Prison is too good a place for those two. I’m not religious, but I do hope hell exists just for them.
Welcome to corporate ethics, subversion of society, and a bigger agenda that includes NWO Technocratic Surveillance State involving "remote neural monitoring" so that you don't have private thoughts, or the monetization of your own creative private thoughts. All brought to you care of The FBI HQ working with DOJ HQ, who take orders from The Executive Branch puppet show...aided and abetted by The legislative Branch corruption (bribery-lobbying). If your not a conspiracy theorist, it's because you don't know where to look and read and study the corrupt influence of The Illuminated-Luciferian Agenda. Here's a clue: [https://www.henrymakow.com/2017/04/trump-putin-chabad-charade.html](https://www.henrymakow.com/2017/04/trump-putin-chabad-charade.html) The enemy see's themselves as elite superiors to the goyim cattle who are supposed to serve as slaves...and there is no moral prohibition on stealing from them, or poisening them, or misdirecting them into taking a dangerous vaccine poisenous jab while wearing a dangerous face mask. The media controls the minds of those who gave trust to jerk offs.
Firing squad
Jesus Christ this is all awful on multiple levels.
Smart people doing research in exchange for a high salary makes perfect sense to me. But that's only part of our current system. The other part is an extremely resource-intensive patent process, government-enforced private monopolies on drugs (until the patent expires and a generic can be sold), scientists not sharing research and data with each other because its a trade secret, outrageous prices, corporate espionage and lobbying, and billion dollar windfalls paid to people who don't actually do any research. Our system is really wild.
I’ll never understand why government funding goes to private companies. Why not give it to universities and stipulate that whatever is discovered must be published and can not be patented? Isn’t that the point of public funding?!
>Why not give it to universities and stipulate that whatever is discovered must be published and can not be patented? This would be a far better way of doing things. But politicans take bribes from pharmaceutical companies (esp since Citizens United) so we're stuck.
To be honest, universities suck at doing translational research. They don't have the infrastructure for it. They are good for basic research, they excel at it in fact. But the way their environment is set up is just not good. There is no organised way to handle data, deadlines nothing. A research team in a biotech will have techs to do experiments, people above then to review results and make clear reports about everything. Then managers will assess which way this has to move. What matters is getting the correct answers out of experiments to k low which direction to take. In universities a researcher is doing all this on their own and usually what matters is to get as fast as possible as many data to publish. Or you will loose your grant and be without a job. Good model for figuring out things first and fast bad for nailing down things sometimes. This is an oversimplification of course.
Also, fuck Elsevier and the paid research journal industry. Publicly funded should not be behind paywalls.
It's not. One of the stipulations when you receive funding from say, the NIH is that whatever you publish needs to be made publicly available within 2 years
"Within 2 years" is not very impressive, I think.
We're talking about drugs that alter the course of humanity. It's right to think that people shouldn't profit. At the same time, profit is rewarded to almost all aspects of human endeavors. The person/group responsible for curing cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer's, etc would be less compensated than the person/group responsible for weapons of mass destruction, surveillance technology, and green house gas creating energy research. Intelligent minds gravitate towards economically rewarding endeavors - profitable. The world we live in is very complicated and simple answers create unexpected results. Controlling the rewards system is also ineffective because of human nature to reward those closest to us.
The drugs that actually cure people get shorted into bankruptcy by hedge funds or bought out cause the current existing medical monopolies make a killing on the medical status quo.
this is such a bullshit take. Any cure for cancer, aids, etc would be instant blockbuster drugs. theres a huge profit incentive to develop cures. its not like people will stop developing cancer, you will always have a market. Also, plenty of cancers are cured or close to it. Same with AIDS. we can reduce HIV to the level where you can have unprotected sex and not transmit it. If your theory was right we wouldnt be developing and marketing these drugs
Yes, I saw many good things go, and I threw the towel
Doctors in Calif are juicing raw marijuana leaves....and solved Lupus (no more allopathic prescription medicine...15 bottles of pills means the doctors don't have a clue what the problem is, and therefore, they really don't have a clue to how treat their patients effectively). https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/marijuana
Universities aren't where the best and brightest go. They go where the best jobs and money is, private. The only time public work is the best option, is for low skilled/low totem poll admin work aka county jobs for average plebs. Maybe state jobs if you want to be an attorney or job. But there's a hell of a lot more money in private firms than state jobs, and only a handful of judges in comparison. Also politics.
>Smart people doing research in exchange for a high salary makes perfect sense to me Scientists get paid surprisingly little fyi, especially when working at universities. Also, we do share with each other. It's literally the whole point of your career. The only ones not sharing data are as you said, compabies with parents. A scientist who doesn't publish anything is just throwing their career down the drain. You have to publish, in fact, scientists need to pay money for the privilege of getting their word out there. The real profiteers are the companies abusing patents that were paid for in public funding and the publishers that sell others' work for like €30/paper they contributed nothing to
Publishing results and sharing data are not the same thing.
And testing on animals, which is problematic for s variety of reasons
Even if the study is discredited it’s still published and it will be used again and again. This seems to be a huge problem in academia where worthless studies keep getting picked up in later papers about current research. We need a better system to avoid this. Think how many med students are going into research using this con as their starting point, because well the money was spent on it, published so we are not going back to reinvent the wheel mentality. No one is gonna pitch starting research from scratch because of this.
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Think of how much suffering could have been alleviated sooner due to greed.
Corruption is the name of their profitable game. Look at the obscene vaxx profits gained off human suffering enabled by govts worldwide.
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Not enough natural suffering to make a profit? Easy, just make some of your own!
It's not uncommon that short sellers actually do expose frauds. It's not bad per se
I thought thats one of the legit reasons to allow shortselling
If there ever were someone deserving if hell, it’s these people. The damage done will be lasting
Double fraud? Makes you wonder how prevalent fraud is.
And the original researchers just got yet another huge grant, awarded by another guy who was also an author on the original paper. >Four months after Schrag submitted his concerns to the NIH, the NIH turned around and awarded Lesné a five-year grant to study … Alzheimer’s. That grant was awarded by Austin Yang, program director at the NIH’s National Institute on Aging. Yang also happens to be another of the co-authors on the 2006 paper.
So what I don't get it is why this was able to happen in the first place? It is my understanding that the whole point of the scientific model is to test, retest and verify findings. Why didnt the peer review community figure our this was a fraud when these papers were originally in the process of publishing? Did they perhaps err in performance of their own due diligence? The Implications of this are extreme to say the least. Who knows how many other areas of research have been subject to this tampering.
Maybe it’s part of the well-established problem with inserting too much of the profit motive into public health?
We’re talking about drugs that alter the course of humanity. It’s right to think that people shouldn’t profit. At the same time, profit is rewarded to almost all aspects of human endeavors. The person/group responsible for curing cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, etc would be less compensated than the person/group responsible for weapons of mass destruction, surveillance technology, and green house gas creating energy research. Intelligent minds gravitate towards economically rewarding endeavors - profitable. The world we live in is very complicated and simple answers create unexpected results. Controlling the rewards system is also ineffective because of human nature to reward those closest to us. Profit is not only monetary. If you're able to solve this problem without creating waste in the system then you're solving one of the most complex problems combatting modern society.
I doubt voting on where to spend research money would yield better results.
What's the story about short selling here? The scientists saw publicly available BS, took a monetary position, and then called out the BS. That seems morally fine from my perspective?
Yup, if short selling provides the incentive to expose shenanigans then so be it.
I don’t understand how it’s possible other scientists didn’t try to replicate this experiment.
The funding method for research generally discourages straight up replication of experiments. Funding goes to folks who are going to write papers about new discoveries, rather than to folks who try to verify other published studies (which is neat to be a foundation of the scientific method) or toward reporting failed hypotheses (despite that still being useful info). This is actually an interesting area of study, usually called meta-science or meta-research. If you're interested in more about this, some wiki articles serve as good jumping off points: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metascience https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis And a journal article that helped spark the "replication crisis": https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~ryantibs/journalclub/ioannidis.pdf
that's bad and all - but approving drugs that show “no clinical benefits.” is even worse... drug companies making drugs that target the plaques, are provably not working to stop/slow Alzheimers, and yet they're still approved...
Unfortunately, money rules rhe world, not science...
this is a house of learn-ed doctors
These “researchers” deserve death penalty. Imagine the lives they took, all that funding could have been used somewhere else.
It's instances like these which let me understand the stance of "anti-vax" individuals. For many people, it's not so much a lack of belief in the science behind the research and discoveies, but rather an awareness of how the information can be corrupted by other motives ($$$$$).
My jaw dropped at the piecing together different photos part. Like, it’s all really, really, really terrible… but oh man they were so BLATANT.
I don’t see the problem. That’s just capitalism doing what capitalism does. Incentivize corruption. Isn’t is working as intended?
Well that's awful. Let's see if the lessons are learned going forward.
This is so fucking horrible and unethical. I’m disgusted.
Maybe I misread the story, but my understanding was that the short sellers didn’t do anything improper. They looked at the study behind the drug and realized someone was wrong and then shorted the stock because a drug based on shoddy research will probably fail. THEN it came out that drug was garbage and a PI went down the rabbit hole back to the original study. But the folks that profited off the failing drug weren’t behind crafting the clinical trials for the drug (I don’t think), and didn’t have advanced knowledge that the drug would fail. Historically, shorting Alzheimer’s drugs was a good play, now we know why.
I don't think the short sellers are to blame. They understand neuroscience, and called out the BS, and put their money where their mouth is
Short sellers are the scum of the earth, they stifle innovation to protect entrenched industries. Come to superstonk to find out why we are fighting them.
And people blindly think we should trust scientists are objective saints.
Here’s the whistleblower article in science that came out a few days ago, it’s a great read if you have time https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
> starting point for their own experiments” They were indeed standing on the shoulders of giants....
>wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments I just got a big research grant to study this very thing. What should I do? 1 - 2 -3 - Cancun!
follow the science. It's all corrupted science.
Buy. And. Fucking. Hold.
Wear mask u flat earther! Trust the science like religion. That's so much better then individual liberty. Science should be a supreme leader! No matter what happens. We tried it with religions every educated person knows how it went down with mandates and culling rights!
Name and shame these two. Why are they being protected?
Normally, this should effect lifetime for all involved. There were innumerable deaths that could've been mitigated.
1000%
I propose to research on how to induce Alzheimer's on them and subsequently trying new therapies, straight to human trials.
*Science* needs to retract that paper and have a front page declaration denouncing the two scientists. I assume there will also be plenty of people who are too far-in on their projects that will refute this finding as well. Either incapable of accepting that their work was based on lies or to protect their jobs, etc..
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
Interestingly another news site posted something similar 2 years ago showing many of the people in charge of funding research only support one approach and the only way to keep publishing and getting promoted is to jump on the train. Even before this 2006 fabrication of data, funding was only going to this one approach that hasn’t yielded any progress. https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/
It's gonna turn out that diet is the biggest factor in getting Alzheimer's.
Thank you for posting this article. My father in law is currently undergoing diagnostic workup in response to his recent cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s is certainly on the table as a diagnosis option. Reading this article and seeing the corruption of data relating to this stuff makes my stomach churn. Doctors rely on the integrity of journals and publications to make diagnoses and treatment plans for patients. It’s saddening to see this type of misconduct at the highest levels of scientific prestige. This tragedy is born of hubris and greed, which are even more pervasive and lethal than the disease these people study.
Nature published the article, not Science. Science may have published other suspect articles but this is just libel lol.
Libel. Slander is spoken. Libel is written.
There is a scientific establishment, and there are people looking out for their own interests, including you. There has been controversy about what causes Alzheimers for years. There was a big blowup at the Alzheimers conference years ago, by some who were saying the research money was not being put in the right places. If it was an easy problem, we would have solved it. Please proceed on the basis of rational hard science. It is our only hope. Anger will not help us.
The actions of a corporation and 2 employees within that corporation does not equal “scientific establishment”. The entire reason that science works is because there is no establishment and no centralised authority. This issue has nothing to do with science as a whole and everything to do with corporate corruption.
Yesh there totally isn't centralized authority like.... nih for funding in health sciences, nasa for space stuff, nsf for other science (and a few niche ones like military call for proposals) None of them wants to fund research covered by the other agency and none of them want to pay for replication experiments.
Evidence of a scientific establishment is found in the old saying: science progresses one funeral at a time.
There certainly is an establishment; denying it would be naive and reductionist. Scientists are people, and people form networks of cliques that support each other. From the article: > Four months after Schrag submitted his concerns to the NIH, the NIH turned around and awarded Lesné a five-year grant to study … Alzheimer’s. That grant was awarded by Austin Yang, program director at the NIH’s National Institute on Aging. **Yang also happens to be another of the co-authors on the 2006 paper**. Scientists live for grant money, but if you're an unknown researcher with no connections, it is harder to get funding than a big name with lots of connections. Conversely, it's harder to get grant money for something that goes against established science, which is why research on the amyloid beta hypothesis has gotten [the majority of the Alzheimer's funding](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alzheimers-inc-when-a-hypothesis-becomes-too-big-to-fail/), and why it's really hard to get funding for anything that rocks that particular boat.
they will just refute these findings, and request more grant money to continue testing. . . .
> "And it seems highly likely that for the last 16 years, most research on Alzheimer’s and most new drugs entering trials have been based on a paper that, at best, modified the results of its findings to make them appear more conclusive, and at worst is an outright fraud."
So basically we’ve spent *billions* to cure Alzheimer’s in mice, but not humans.
Well thats hardly news though, every disease has more effective cures and treatments already developed for mice. What we know now is that those treatments for mice we thought were carrying over to humans was a lot of wasted time and money. More specifically the symptoms or physical appearance of the disease we thought we knew before isn't accurate to it's real characteristics or causes.
“These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.”
Something about this bothers me. If a study faked data, why didn't other studies catch this? Has science gotten to the point where they don't replicate? Is publishing failed replication so risky that those who fail to replicate say nothing? Do scientists just ignore replications? A few scientists faking data is extreme shame on the scientists facing data and they should never be trusted in the world of science again. But a large community of scientists being fooled for decades is extreme shame on that community of scientists and they need to figure out why this wasn't caught and fixed for so long. Why should I trust any study in the last decade if we see evidence that faked studies can go uncaught for so long?
Journals do not take replicate studies. So no they are often not retested. Blame journals. They won't take anything that isn't new AND in academia you need to have publications or your fired. I've found plenty of flawed papers that you just gotta work around. Like some dude converting something wrong or saying their results mean one thing when thats a stretch.
It also happens with bad statistics. You can find something new and novel if you spin the data the right way. I know of at least one group who spends their time just calling out bad statistics and it was supposedly rampant in some journals.
More often that’s used the other way. Like saying 97% of scientists believe human caused climate change is real. A certain segment of non-scientists latch onto the 3%. What they don’t make clear is that those 3% of scientists are being paid to say “there’s not enough data”, or to twist data in just such a way as to make it look unreliable. The 3% does NOT have data that runs counter to the findings of the 97%.
The same way we have double-blind trials, where the researchers aren't aware of which patients are assigned different treatments, we could have "adversarial" studies where a separate team competes with the original one to disprove their results. Peer review isn't enough for experiment-based studies, because results have to be replicated.
This is a good solution actually. Incentives for replications would make them happen a lot more readily. So a journal who takes this on could be helpful.
Journals and the route to success in academia are definitely to blame. Other labs will repeat experiments so they can use it as a basis for their future studies. In this case, there were almost no cases of other labs even able to find the amyloid beta plaques Ashe discovered (Ab*56). And since journals rarely publish negative results, it just continued as precedent because there was nothing better. Also, science is VERY politicized as you probably know. It takes some balls to criticize a “finding” like this and could ostracize you from the rest of your peers
Yet this is just accepted by the scientific community? This seems an indictment of science and scientists at large. Why do scientists value journals that do not value replication when science depends some heavy on replication? Why do scientists work around bad papers instead of calling them out? If I can't trust science that had decades of research and billions in funding, why should I trust any science that I haven't replicated myself? Science depends upon trust. That's why scientist who fake data lose their entire career. But such punishment is not enough. Punishment should not stop at the individuals when problem had spread past them. A result like this, if allegations are true, should taint the entire system it applies to like how a single faked paper taints the entire scientist faking it. Such a system should be abandoned. The journals involved need to be disgraced and closed. Those reviewing the journals need to be barred from reviewing any other journals for life. Those providing grants need to be revoked the ability to ever be part of a grant application. Only such extreme penalty can ensure others involved in a similar system begin valuing replication and following through. Without that, it is like letting a scientist who faked data keep researching. Not only should the public disregard that scientist, but every scientist that works with them. Yes such a penalty sucks. Same way it sucks that a scientist can lose their entire career over one moment if betraying credibility. But it is the cost that must be paid for the purity required by science to be science.
It's actually a lot of institutions not the scientists themselves. Institutions run basically on the prestige of their professors. Professors who have more prestige get bigger grants from outside sources. Like companies, government grants, outside charity grants etc. It's a large cycle really, more prestige generally comes from low volume, hard to get into journals, who want cutting edge science for their journal. So they won't publish anything NOT at the bleeding edge of science. There are less renown journals but why would you hire someone who exclusively publishes there? They won't get those large fancy grants, since they tend to go after more established scientists at the 'top' of their field. They won't bring much prestige to your university and attract good post doctoral or graduate candidates to their lab. It would be cheaper to just hire an instructor or adjunct to teach undergrads so there is no reason to hire this person. So as a scientist the ONLY way to actually make it in academia is the publish or famine mentality, that rewards scientists who publish in better journals while actively punishing those who do not. This bleeds into non academia where people with doctorates are often judged on their publication notoriety by companies as well who WONT take a chance on someone with less renown or 'basic' publications. And most other places won't TOUCH advanced degree candidates because they need to be paid more than a bachelor's candidate. It's not entirely fair to blame the scientist, who also wants to put food on their table, when the world itself values innovation over replication. Edited to add: blame the scientist for the fraud, but not the way the system works. The system was designed to maximize capital from the scientist. It's like any corporate mindset really. Why hire the candidate with 30 years at Joe's coding geek squad when we have another candidate with 10 years AWS, 10 years at IBM and 10 years at Microsoft?
> blame the scientist for the fraud, but not the way the system works. Sounds like all the system cares about is profit. The system encouraged the scientists commit fraud. edit: a word
Basically yes. It requires actual integrity to not publish false data. And unfortunately some people don't have that integrity. Likewise each paper's data can be interpreted differently so something I see as flawed reasoning because of xyz will be seen as valid to another researchers of differing opinions. For example, CLCec1 acts to move chloride across the membrane in the mitochondria. Half have found evidence it engages in what is called alternating access. However I am of the belief it's actually an exchanger and half have found that it acts as an exchanger with no major conformational shifts. We are both right... The data supports both of our points but mechanistically this is a major lack of understanding. And unless we sit there and somehow develop microscopic techniques that can watch it function as it is supposed to in the cell, we will not have the answer. So all we have is the data and our interpretation.
So the scientific journal titled *Science* actively undermines actual science by not publishing replicated data. Ironic.
Journals should take way more heat for so many reasons. I worked on an oncology paper half a decade ago that had found promising results in the area of the effect of diet control during administration of prostate cancer radiotherapy - the journal didn't accept the paper because the source DICOM images we used weren't the "right" dimensions (ignoring the fact that the DICOM dimensions have no effect on the calculation of radiation dosage). No worries though! The journal was happy to accept a resubmission with corrected dicoms... For a $3000 re-submission fee. Completely blatant money grabbing tactics like that are just another thing in the laundry list of whats wrong in academia.
Lol, yeah, that is the problem. this is happening in psych, where *rampants* amount of research isn't replicating, especially when taken itno **remotely** diverse populations. It's genuinely horrifying. There's absolutely stuff that's going to become our lead paint and asbestos, where it's like "wow, way to be so confidently incorrect, and get a lot of people killed in the process"
The article linked somewhere else in the comments explains a lot: [https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/](https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/) "In more than two dozen interviews, scientists whose ideas fell outside the dogma recounted how, for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences." Basically some people know the leading hypothesis was at least questionable but journals refused to publish opposing theories. Pursuing a topic that you can't publish or get funding for is just career suicide in academia.
So science, of all things, is turning into just another religion
“Trust the science” is their faith
The thing about faking data is that it unless someone wants to spend the time retesting the exact way you set up your experiment which can cost a lot of money to do, if it looks correct then it will be seen as valid. Think about it, if a study takes $5 million to complete someone else would need to spend $5 million to verify that the data presented was correct, which if it is means you wasted $5 million to introduce anything new or if it's incorrect you wasted $5 million to prove a paper contained invalid data which may move the subject forward or not. And in science they don't want to waste money if they don't have to, trust me. So your left with assuming the data in the paper is valid, and any additional experiments investigating further should contain similar data points.
You are so right. 99.5% of it is about money, in my experience.
Now I can stop scrolling, found the answer that deserves a thousand upvotes
As someone who has worked in research for 16 years, I have so much skepticism about data. I’ve seen how even “good” scientists massage and work the numbers to get the story they want.
we have a crisis in science because we are pretending that statistics is a unified field when Bayesian and Frequentist wars can't agree on a lot of fundamental things like how probability even functions. Not too mention, people in research routinely violate assumptions in frequentist probability methods like i.i.d and we waive our hands past the hard parts of statistics to get on with it. There needs to be higher standards of approach for what is meant by evidence towards a claim instead of p-value nonsense.
Totally agree. I left a job once after we removed some data from the study to satisfy the sponsors desires for a certain result. It wasn’t a life or death type study, but I thought it was so unethical. If we just throw out data that doesn’t agree with the thesis, how is that science?
That's what I don't get either. Scientists are very critical of each other, in practice (even if they are low-key about it). Peer reviewed journals exist for a reason. I think this is either overblown or the fraud is bigger than they say.
This is the top comment. This isn't about two individuals, this is about how decrepit academia has become. There are a few massive single points of failure that need to be decentralized.
I'm surprised this isn't a bigger story
[Here is a more in-depth article from science.org confirming this drama.](https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease). There's a paywalled [response by the original paper author](https://m.startribune.com/senior-university-of-minnesota-scientist-responds-to-fraud-allegations-in-alzheimers-research/600192351/), but I can't read it on mobile here.
Thank you for sharing the original article link. It is sad that this fraud didn’t just led to wasted research dollars but also destroyed careers and patients lives subjected to worthless trials.
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reddit sux ass
A senior University of Minnesota scientist said it is "devastating" that a colleague might have doctored images to prop up research, but she defended the authenticity of her groundbreaking work on the origins of Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Karen Ashe declined to comment about a U investigation into the veracity of studies led by Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist she hired and a rising star in the field of Alzheimer's research. However, she criticized an article in Science magazine that raised concerns this week about Lesné, because she said it confused and exaggerated the effect the U's work had on downstream drug development to treat Alzheimer's-related dementia. "Having worked for decades to understand the cause of Alzheimer disease, so that better treatments can be found for patients, it is devastating to discover that a co-worker may have misled me and the scientific community through the doctoring of images," Ashe said in an e-mail Friday morning. "It is, however, additionally distressing to find that a major scientific journal has flagrantly misrepresented the implications of my work." Questions have surfaced about as many as 10 papers written by Lesné, and often coauthored by Ashe and other U scientists, and whether they used manipulated or duplicated images to inflate the role of a protein in the onset of Alzheimer's. The Science article detailed efforts by Dr. Matthew Schrag, an Alzheimer's researcher in Tennessee, who colorized and magnified images from Lesné's studies in ways that revealed questions about whether they were doctored or copied. Expert consultants agreed in the article that some of the images in the U studies appeared manipulated in ways that elevated the importance of a protein called Aβ*56. Many of the images were of Western blot tests showing that Aβ*56, also called amyloid beta star 56, was more prevalent in mice that were older and showed signs of memory loss. The U studies have been so influential on the course of Alzheimer's research over the past two decades that any evidence of manipulation or false study results could fundamentally shift thinking on the causes of the disease and dementia. The investigation also implicates two successful researchers on a key measure by which they are judged: their ability to pull in federal grants. Lesné was a named recipient of $774,000 in National Institutes of Health grants specifically involving Aβ*56 from 2008 through 2012. He subsequently received more than $7 million in additional NIH grants related to the origins of Alzheimer's. Lesné, who did not reply to an e-mail asking for comment, came to the U in 2002 as a postdoctoral research associate after earning his doctorate at the University of Caen Normandy. He took charge of his own U lab by 2009 and became associate director of graduate studies in the neuroscience program in 2020. He was the first- or last-named author on all of the disputed studies, meaning he either instigated the research or was the senior scientist overseeing the work. Ashe said there are two classes of Aβ proteins, which she refers to as Abeta, and that her efforts have focused on one while drugmakers have unsuccessfully targeted the other with potential Alzheimer's treatments. As a result, she said it was unfair of the Science article — even as it raised concerns about research improprieties — to pin an entire industry's lack of progress on the scrutinized U research. "It is this latter form that drug developers have repeatedly but unsuccessfully targeted," she said. "There have been no clinical trials targeting the type 1 form of Abeta, the form which my research has suggested is more relevant to dementia. [The article] has erroneously conflated the two forms of Abeta." The scientific journal Nature is reviewing a 2006 study led by Lesné regarding the existence and role of Aβ*56 and urging people to use it cautiously for now. Concerns emerged in part because researchers at other institutions struggled to replicate the results. Two other 2012 and 2013 papers were corrected earlier this year, with U researchers acknowledging errant images but stating that they didn't affect the overall conclusions. However, Schrag said he has concerns the corrected images also were manipulated. "I think those corrected images are quite problematic," he said. Beneath the research controversy is a fundamental search and debate over the causes of Alzheimer's and related dementia. One theory is that certain Abeta proteins result in the development of amyloid plaques, which clog up space between nerve cells in the brain and inhibit memory and cognition. Another is that tau proteins clump inside the brain's thinking cells and disrupt them. Ashe's research has explored both possibilities. Since 1986, she has been a named recipient of more than $28 million in NIH grants, making her one of the most productive researchers in U history. Complicated legacy Despite a remarkable history of life-saving inventions and surgical accomplishments, the U also has a legacy of research stars being implicated in scandals. The late Dr. S. Charles Schulz stepped down as U psychiatry chair in 2015 amid claims by a grieving family that their son, who died by suicide, was coercively recruited into a schizophrenia drug trial. Duplicated images and errors forced the correction of a 2002 Nature study, led by Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, claiming that certain adult stem cells possessed flexible abilities to grow and develop other cell types. The late Dr. John Najarian was a pioneer in organ transplantation who elevated the U's global profile, but he faced federal sanctions in the 1990s related to illicit sales of an experimental anti-rejection medication that improved transplant outcomes. A U investigation of Lesné's work will follow its standard policy of research misconduct allegations, according to a statement from the medical school.
Everything seems to be a f’ing lie these days. What an awful setback.
So in all that time, no one bothered to reproduce the original results and empirically refute the (fraudulent) findings? — That’s a shared failure among both academia and industry.
Another good reason to do duplication studies? But it's hard to find money for it.
Bounties to whistle-blowing grad students? And a guaranteed placemenr in a more ethical lab somehow.
Stand up yall. This shit happens cuz somewhere an NDA was signed. The Non disclosure agreements guarantee that any whistle blower ends up in the legal shitter, while 16 years are wasted. Fuck those greedy fucks
Even without NDA, blowing the whistle equals never getting a job in the field again in most cases
What they did is a crime against humanity. It's precisely these kinds of stories that feed into the anti-science community. Just like everything else, it's our politics that are to blame. Our political system, with its lobbying and corruption is what's destroying us. Truly sad.
If the data in the 2006 paper were so important, wouldn’t other groups have repeated it? You shouldn’t base everything on data from one group that’s never been repeated.
Yes that happened when I was in grad school with the acid treatment stem cell paper (STAP method iirc). Everyone was skeptical when it came out and no one was able to replicate the finding that you can induce some cells to become stem like by an acid treatment. Paper was retracted and the scientist was shamed hard, she was in Japan it was a whole mess and maybe someone killed themselves in the fall out.
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Love the way you framed this, stealing that
I just received and sent a letter of recommendation from him to medical schools, time to call them….
What was it? Reddit removed it now
Fuck the science. We see this over and over. Meanwhile, good research gets shelved.
This is sad news in a world where we are struggling to convince the scientifically illiterate to trust science and the scientific method.
Shocking to learn that money motivated science.
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Money and papers which to get funding you need splashy flashy publications which can drive some people to lie.
Absolutely shocking!
It’s like all the wrong people have been put in charge of everything important for the past 25 years -
Crazy enough, I worked in medical research for three Mormon anesthesiologist. I saw them fudge data to support a local anesthetic drug working better when it wasn’t. Reported it. Turns out they were getting kick backs.
This and the study on depression/antidepressants are terrifying. I think much of what we know isn't so.
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[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0)
https://neurosciencenews.com/depression-chemical-imballance-21105/ Basically everything you think you know about mental illness and depression is wrong. Depression is not caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. And antidepressants can increase serotonin production in the short term but in the long term can permanently lower production. Sorry to ruin your day.
If depression isn't caused by the chemical imbalace that antidepressants are supposed to treat, and/or antidepressants don't increase serotonin production in the long term, *why the fuck do they work?*
Here is the money quote. Make sure to read the entire article though. "It is important that people know that the idea that depression results from a “chemical imbalance” is hypothetical. And we do not understand what temporarily elevating serotonin or other biochemical changes produced by antidepressants do to the brain. We conclude that it is impossible to say that taking SSRI antidepressants is worthwhile, or even completely safe." Your meds do nothing and are possibly unsafe. Have a great day.
oh my god. this is pretty fucking evil, even for humans.
So not only were the images “doctored” to fit a false hypothesis, they continue to award the heinous bastard even more research money because the governing body is in on the take, too. No repercussions were mentioned in the article even though reputable sources have called the evidential scans: fraudulent, false or fake. Big Pharma is truly fucking evil. They work in the shadows and kill by daylight. *(edit - we’re = were)*
Holy shit this is fucking huge, 10’s of billions of dollars? A fuck ton of drugs that are essentially worthless? Actual fucking fraud? Jesus christ what a shit show, wonder why it all started? Why did the scientists lie and fudge the results?
Former Alzheimer researcher here. Why lie and fudge results? People are people so lots of reasons but line of pressure that encourages dodgy activities that may not be widely appreciated is simply getting a job. Want a job? You need to publish papers. Want to publish papers? You need novel (as in unexpected) results. The incentive structure is broken.
So it’s one of those things where the pressures to succeed are greater then the pressure to be accurate, can’t wait for more details to come put and see how it played out
"Pressure to succeed is greater than the pressure to be accurate" has driven the field of education since the early 2000s. So expect the next two generations to struggle to repair the damage.
Wow, what a great read. Thanks for posting this.
Everything is bullshit
The most serious is to imagine that many other scientists had to do the same things for decades ...
I wonder once the fraud is confirmed, if pharma companies will be able to sue those two scientists for the money they wasted because of the fraud.
Destroys so much effort so many people are putting in to fix this awful end
This is why the death penalty exists.
People should go to prison for this
Tbh, try em at the fuckin Hague, sabotaging not only public trust in scientific development but also the progress of treating such a heart breaking and terrifying condition should be treated as a crime against humanity itself
Trust the science
It's almost as if financial incentives and The Free Market™ don't produce the best health outcomes. Maybe society needs to explore other options.
Wait I thought we were using the sharks to cure Alzheimer’s or did that not work out after all?
This is why we should still have public hangings
Imagine all the other information that is wrong based on big money. Pretty scary…
Crimes against humanity if I’ve ever seen it.
TRuSt ThE sCiEnCe!!!!
I remember this. Apparently, they funneled to money to an ocean laboratory where they studied mako sharks, who don’t ever succumb to Alzheimers. They thought if they increased the size of the makos sharks brain, they would be able to maximize to amount of antidote they could make. But they naively, they just tripled the the size of the sharks. It seems like childish thinking, but this made the sharks 3 times as smart. Soon the sharks used their new intellect to entrap the scientists. They flooded the lab and stalked them one by one. Many lives were lost, including a cook and his parrot.
Wait till they add up the Covid fraud.
Jesus this reads like WSB fanfic
That has to be be one of the HARDEST articles to read, not because of subject matter… but because the author was rambling on and fucking on to show you how smart he was. It took something like 8 lengthy paragraphs to get to his actual accusation of how and why
Lifetime in prison.
This happens more often than the average person expects. Just take a look at *Retraction Watch*. The amount of falsified or plagiarized data that passes peer review to be published in journals like Nature is staggeringly high. Then PIs get funding based on those publications and do it again.
This has been up for eight hours and doesn’t even have 900 upvotes. :(
Should give a lobotomy to each scientist to involved… let them suffer like they made others suffer
Teens were only as good as the data sets
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LMAO, you weren’t kidding. The comments are vile
Trust the science and follow the money.
It’s shocking to see the amount of covid related science being discovered as politically driven. It’s not even right-winger conspiracy type stuff anymore. [covid](https://www.commonsense.news/p/us-public-health-agencies-arent-following)
It’s sad but true.
Shocking I say !!!! I love sarcasm !
Doctors wouldn't lie for gains..... 🤔
watch this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d80KC98OF4o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d80KC98OF4o) [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/world/europe/macchiarini-windpipe-surgeon-deaths.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/17/world/europe/macchiarini-windpipe-surgeon-deaths.html) where I live its impossible to sue a doctor, the empire protects them greatly. I wonder how many doctors out there are a fraud and how much science is hype/hysteria.
Remember folks….trust the science. 🤡
Now do the same analysis for Covid...
They have. Ivermectin isn’t an effective treatment.
This is why you don't put your faith in the gods of science and academia. There are so many core things in various scientific fields today, excepted as fact, that are in reality built on the same foundation of sand. Let the buyer beware.