February 6, 2025 • 55 mins
In this episode of the Aging Well Podcast, investigative journalist Charles Piller shares insights from his upcoming expose, 'Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's.' Piller reveals how scientific misconduct and systematic greed have severely hindered Alzheimer's research. He discusses impactful cases, the role of whistleblowers like Matthew Schrag, and the profound implications for patients and the broader scientific community. This conversation delves into the mishandling of billions of dollars in research funding and the critical need to reclaim integrity in science. Join us for an eye-opening discussion on the state of Alzheimer's research and the quest for truth in science.Learn more about Charles Piller at https://www.science.org/content/author/charles-pillerBUY 'Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's' on Amazon and support the Podcast: https://amzn.to/3DceZmN
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(00:05):
In this episode of the Aging World Podcast, we are joined by
award-winning investigative journalist Charles Pillar to
discuss his forthcoming expose, doctored fraud, arrogance and
Tragedy in the quest to cure Alzheimer's.
This groundbreaking work revealshow scientific misconduct and
systematic greed have derailed Alzheimer's Research, wasting
billions of dollars and and decades of potential progress.
(00:27):
Charles brings us into the worldof whistleblowers, fraudulent
research, and the critical fightto reclaim integrity and
science. Together, we'll explore the
profound implications for his findings, not only for
Alzheimer's patients and their families, but for the future of
scientific research as a whole. If you care about public health,
science, and truth, this is a conversation you won't want to
miss. Charles, welcome to the Aging
(00:51):
World podcast. Can you start by just telling us
a little bit about yourself and how you came to be a journalist
blowing the whistle on scientific research?
Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me and I
appreciate being here. Sure, I have been working as a
journalist on scientific and technical subjects for many
(01:12):
years. I've reported on a lot of things
in my career, but maybe for the last 15 plus years I've been
strongly focused on science, a lot of stuff related to
Biological Sciences, which is a long story in my career.
I many years ago was doing a lotof work on biological warfare
(01:34):
issues and wrote a book on that,and in recent years I've been
working for that specialize in medicine and Biological
Sciences. In particular, I work for STAT,
which is a website that covers medicine quite extensively.
And the last few years I've beenat Science magazine where we
(01:54):
have a focus in particular on research, and my area has been
looking at biological research and also clinical research.
That's experiments involving people to test the safety and
efficacy of drugs. So what inspired you to delve
into the world of investigative journalism, and particularly in
(02:16):
the realm of public health and science?
Well, at the risk of dating myself, I'm old enough to have
been inspired by the reportage of the Watergate reporters back
in the 70s, and I was a kid. But I know I read that stuff.
I heard about it and it kind of prompted me to want to try to
(02:38):
use journalism in a way that could benefit society by
exposing wrongdoing or problems just that require some
attention. Because I've always had a bit of
a technical bent, could say my personality, I'm interested in
technical subjects. I've always been curious to try
(03:00):
to figure out how do you describe a complex set of
information about science or technology to a general
audience, to people who are curious but don't have the time
to become an expert themselves. And so I view myself as someone
who both uncovers information about potential challenges,
(03:23):
problems, issues in the world ofscience, but also who can
communicate it in a clear, coherent and I hope, pretty easy
to understand way to people who are my readers.
That's going to be especially challenging in this age of
TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts.
True enough, true enough. I have to tip my hat to some of
(03:46):
the folks who are truly experts in bringing a complex science to
the masses. But I'm more of a word guy.
But I do the best I can. I like the words too.
So, can you share how your reporting for science has LED
you to uncover this web of misconduct in Alzheimer's
Research? Yeah, I'd be happy to do that.
So started in 2021, and I was tipped by kind of an indirect
(04:13):
group via a colleague of mine toa source who understood well and
was involved in exposing apparent misconduct associated
with an Alzheimer's drug. The drug, the name of the drug
is Simufilum, and it was produced by a company called
Cassava Sciences. And a complaint was made to the
(04:34):
Food and Drug Administration, which is the agency, as people
probably know, that administers and regulates the approval and
warnings associated with a prescription drugs and some
other drugs as well. And after a series of
conversations with this particular guy who had been
(04:55):
looking into a problems associated with science behind
the drug. And, and when I say problems, I
mean apparent misconduct associated with manipulation of
images in the scientific papers that supported the development
of the drug. So in other words, you know what
you might call in simple terms, possible fraud in the
(05:17):
development of the drug. In my communications with him, I
learned from him that there weresome bigger questions in the
field, bigger questions initially associated with a set
of important research, in particular a very famous and
very highly cited study in the journal Nature, which is one of
(05:42):
the most important scientific journals in the world.
And this study involved a kind of a proof of concept for the
most important, most dominant hypothesis in the field of
Alzheimer's Research. It's called the amyloid
hypothesis and I can explain, ifI may very briefly, what that
(06:03):
is. So the thinking behind this
so-called amyloid hypothesis is that a certain type of proteins
called amyloid beta proteins accumulate in the brain and they
can take a couple different forms.
One is the kind of infamous sticky plaques.
These are deposits of amyloid proteins in the brain and also a
(06:26):
form that can dissolve in cerebro spinal fluid, which is
what the brain is bathed in. And that's a a different kind of
amyloid beta protein. But both of these are regarded
as something that set into placea series of biochemical changes
in the brain that lead ultimately to Alzheimer's
(06:49):
dementia. And so this idea, which is a
pretty interesting idea that hada fair amount of scientific
bases and support, became very well accepted as not just a
hypothesis, but for decades, forthe last several decades, the
dominant way of looking at the disease.
(07:10):
So just to take again, I'm sorry, one step back to this
scientific study in Nature. This was published in 1996, so
it was a long time ago. I'm, I'm sorry, forgive me, I'm
I'm a decade off. It was published in 2006, still
a long time ago, but not quite as far back.
This involved an experiment withmice and rats.
(07:33):
And basically what it did is it used mice that had been
genetically engineered to produce copious amounts of this
amyloid beta protein in their brains.
And the idea is to create mice that in a way mimicked the
symptoms of Alzheimer's disease as an experimental model.
Very typical kind of approach inBiological Sciences.
(07:56):
And So what the scientists did, and these were scientists at the
University of Minnesota, they extracted something they called
amyloid beta *56, a very precisetype of amyloid beta protein,
very precise with its own certain characteristics.
And then they described an experiment where they purified
(08:19):
this protein and then injected into rats.
And what they claimed was the rats then very quickly showed
memory problems that they compared to some of the decline
in memory among Alzheimer's patients.
So what you had was a kind of example, the first example, if
(08:39):
you will, experimentally of A cause and effect relationship
between amyloid beta proteins and Alzheimer's disease, albeit
in in rodents, not in people. And So what whistleblower who I
was talking with was learning, and his name is Matthew Schrag.
He's a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University who has
(09:02):
become an important researcher in research integrity in the
field. And I might add that Matthew,
who I've been working with now for several years on, he does
his image integrity and researchintegrity work separate from his
day job as a professor at Vanderbilt.
So what he was learning was thisparticular study in 2006, this
(09:25):
famous study in nature that had been extremely influential and
had kicked off hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions
of dollars in funding to furtherinvestigate and prove out the
amyloid hypothesis associated with this certain type of
amyloid protein. And it had really steered a lot
(09:47):
of thinking in the field to validate this hypothesis at a
moment when it was beginning to find a lot of skepticism against
it and because it had been trying for a long time to
develop drugs or vaccines to treat Alzheimer's without
success. So what he found was that
(10:08):
several of the key images withinthis scientific study had been
altered, apparently digitally altered in ways that described
the experiment as successful. And yet when you alter images
improperly to support your experimental hypothesis, it
(10:29):
really pretty much says that youdon't have the support that you
need. This was, in fact, if this was
done, it would be a form of extreme scientific misconduct.
So this was the genesis of my interest in this.
And So what ultimately resulted was a story that I did in
science. And science, as your listeners
(10:52):
may know, is also one of the leading scholarly journals in
the world. Of course, we also have a
journalism side of the magazine.That's the part I work for.
I'm not a scientist, don't play one on TVI am simply journalist
working on investigative storiesabout these kinds of matters.
And then they're published in Science magazine and now in my
(11:14):
book Doctor. So just to cut the story short
to the chase, I should say, the story is published in Science in
July of 2022. And it caused kind of a gigantic
explosion of both in the scientific community because it
cast doubt on a prevailing hypothesis in this important
(11:38):
disease. But also it had ramifications
beyond into the world of the families, the people who are
living with Alzheimer's, doctorswho are treating Alzheimer's
patients. It basically raised a lot of
concern about whether there had been incorrect thinking in the
(11:59):
field for many years that had wasted time, wasted scientific
thinking and billions of dollarsin investment.
So that got me off on a much bigger look at the whole panoply
of studies and ideas within Alzheimer's.
And I had to ask myself the question if this important study
(12:21):
had apparently been doctored andwhat more might there be in the
field to look at? What other possible examples
might there be of apparent misconduct that could could have
had deleterious effects on the way people think about the
disease and how drugs are developed?
And that got me off on a how long chase that resulted
(12:43):
ultimately in my book. And there's lots of other
examples that I was able to uncover and describe in the book
as well as in the pages of Science magazine.
So the subtitle of your book refers to fraud, arrogance, and
tragedy. How do these elements intertwine
in the story you uncovered? Well, thanks for that question,
Jeff. I think it's very the
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intertwining aspect is very important.
So what you have are a few factors.
One is you have the dominance ofa single set of ideas called the
amyloid hypothesis within the field.
Doesn't mean that it's exclusiveof every other way of thinking
about Alzheimer's. Obviously, the world is big,
diverse, and complicated. No single idea can completely
(13:27):
dominate. But when you have an idea that
has got such support in the scientific community and among
funders, regulators, universities and the scientific
hierarchy, if you will, including journals, it exerts an
enormous amount of force and pushes people in the direction
of studying it to the exclusion of other, perhaps promising
(13:51):
ideas. So when I say arrogance, what I
partly mean is this kind of sense of certainty that we have
the one true idea about this disease to the exclusion of
other ideas. So I think that arrogance played
a role in the problem we have, which is that there have been no
(14:12):
good drugs developed for Alzheimer's really ever.
There are some drugs in the market and I can very closely
describe those when we get further into the conversation.
But just to go back to your question about these three
issues, fraud, arrogance and tragedy.
Well, the fraud is that, as I described in Doctored, there are
(14:33):
hundreds, perhaps thousands of examples of Doctored studies
just in the work that I did withthe collaboration of some
expert, what we call image sleuths, people who are forensic
image analysts who can look at scientific images and understand
whether they have been improperly altered.
(14:54):
Just for Doctored, we looked at thousands and thousands of
images that seem to have been improperly altered in important
studies related to Alzheimer's disease.
So even though it's still, you know, a small percentage of the
overall body of work for the field, you have to ask yourself
the question. If we were able to find all of
(15:15):
these apparently doctored imagesthat had the effect of
suggesting truth within scientific experiments
improperly, it really raises some bigger questions about how
reliable the body of research isoverall in the field.
So, and there's a couple of examples I can talk about later
(15:35):
that really bring that home. But just to get to the third
pole of your question, tragedy, What is the tragedy?
Well, as millions of Americans who are living with Alzheimer's
and many millions of their lovedones who are caring for them
know, this is one of the most horrible diseases that we've
(15:55):
ever encountered. It steals people's first their
memories, then their ability to have normal relationships with
their loved ones there, and eventually a kind of theft of
their sense of self that makes each one of us human.
And because of that tragic sequence within the illness,
(16:17):
it's a terrifying 1. And the scientific community,
the medical community, owes thispatient population and owes all
of us a kind of determination tothink broadly about these issues
and about what the possible solutions would be.
So if I could just use briefly akind of agricultural analogy
(16:39):
that I think people might want to think about it in regard to
this problem of why is it a problem to focus so closely on a
single hypothesis? Well, if you think about farmers
and how they grow crops, they don't grow the same crop on the
same field year after year afteryear after year for fear of
(17:00):
depleting the nutrition in the soil.
And in a sense, what an over concentration of work on one
hypothesis in this scientific field, the amyloid hypothesis,
it can create a kind of scientific monoculture, if you
will, that depletes the surrounding area of intellectual
creativity for other kinds of ideas.
(17:23):
So I would say those three things, the fraud that implies,
that describes the part of the book that that details dozens
and dozens of scientists whose work is now, I think, challenged
and questionable. The tragedy, of course, is the
patients and their loved ones who are waiting, hoping for a
(17:46):
remedy that has real effectiveness.
And the arrogance is the idea that people feel that they're so
right that they kind of crowd out other creative thinking.
And I would imagine that your work is really just exposed the
tip of an iceberg, and there's probably a lot more deeper stuff
going on throughout science and throughout, you know,
(18:06):
pharmacological development and all that kind of stuff.
Can you describe the role of whistleblowers like Matthew
Shrag? Was it?
Yes, Shrag. Matthew Shrag and their role in
kind of exposing fraudulent practices and Alzheimer's
Research and really other areas of science.
Yeah, I I'd be happy to. Before I describe my work with
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whistleblowers and what their contribution has been, I'd like
to say first of all that I thinkit would be a mistake to assume
that because some research has been apparently product of
misconduct or even fraud, that you can paint a broader, much
broader brush with it. We don't know for sure.
We know that while there is fraud and misconduct in
(18:50):
Alzheimer's Research, I certainly don't think it's more
than in other fields of research, nor do I think it's
more than in any other walk of life.
We know that almost every field has people who are corrupt or
who are willing to cut corners, who are willing to rationalize
themselves that somehow their thinking is so important that
(19:13):
it's OK for them to do things that other people would regard
as improper. But I still think that most
scientists in the field are deeply determined to do the
right thing and to be genuine researchers of important
scientific ideas, even if they might, you know, disagree with
each other or even make mistakes.
(19:33):
We all make mistakes, so I wouldbe hesitant to paint too broad a
brush with this. The second thing I wanted to say
is that even though my book describes an enormous amount of
failure by the institutional authorities of science, and when
I say institutional authorities,I mean the federal regulators,
the funders, the journals and the universities that have been
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very complacent and have not properly addressed the issue.
Of both image integrity and scientific integrity more
generally among the people in their ranks.
So while I'm very critical of their inactivity, their
lassitude, their complacency, I still want to say that we have a
(20:19):
robust and I think very effective compared to the rest
of the world, most of the rest of the world, very effective way
of evaluating possible drugs forhuman use.
We have a very robust and I think very effective
infrastructure for studying medical and scientific questions
(20:39):
that have reaped an enormous reward.
So I just want to be clear that I am not a critic of the entire
scientific establishment. I believe I focused clearly on
some some lapses, some blind spots and some corruption that
needs to be exposed. So, so I'm sorry for that long
digression, Jeff. No, that's quite all right.
(21:00):
And I agree with you and I, but I do think that, you know, it's
good to have that skepticism because I think too often we
have too much trust in the scientific community and you
know, the companies that are developing drugs and the FDA and
all this kind of stuff. And it's important that we have
people like you that are are testing that integrity and
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challenging it and making sure that we're getting the
information. I think that it is honest and
legitimate and that it's not tarnishing the reputations of
good scientists that are out there.
Thank you for saying that. I, I do agree.
And I think just to tie back to your question about
whistleblowers. So why are there whistleblowers
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and why are there people who I have called image sleuths?
That's what they often call themselves.
As I mentioned, the gatekeepers and the authorities of science
have not done a good job of policing possible misconduct and
image manipulation. And So what has happened, and
this is so often the case today given the rise of social media,
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the Internet, and the kind of new constellation of thinking
that has often been stimulated by that.
What we've seen is that an imagesleuths have formed a, you know,
kind of a cottage industry of policing the field because it's
not being well policed by the authorities that are should be
doing the work. And let me just give you an
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example. The scholarly journals have been
very late to the game and understanding how important it
is to check the images that are submitted to them for possible
fraud and reviewers, which are the people who review these
studies before they're included in scholarly journals.
They look at the studies, they provide feedback.
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These are subject matter expertswithin the the particular field.
These are folks who we depend onfor their intellectual integrity
and for their knowledge to make sure that the work that finds
its way into the scientific record is good.
It's well founded and it's been well checked.
But they're not trained to look at images with a critical eye.
(23:10):
They're not trained to see, oh, there may have been improper
alterations in these images meant to support the
experimental hypothesis in an improper way.
And So what has happened is thatthese image sleuths, a kind of a
army of them, a small army from all over the world, have
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developed the skill to do that image analysis.
And a lot of the information that they find is posted to a
website called Hub Peer PUBPR, if anyone wants to look it up.
And this is a website that is a kind of a discussion site for
scientific studies. And the suspect images are
(23:52):
posted up there often with questions for the researchers,
saying things like these images don't look right to me in this
way or in that way. Can the authors of the study
please check and respond? And usually they're presented in
a way as a question because it can be very hard to know with
certainty whether an image has been improperly altered without
(24:15):
having the original high resolution images that were
produced for the experiment. Unfortunately, so often the
experimenters won't supply thoseoriginal images.
And so in my opinion that it's apretty bad look.
They need to be more forthcoming.
So what you've seen is an explosion of interest from these
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image sleuths, many of them anonymously posting to this
site, pub peer, that has caused a real crisis of confidence
within many of the scholarly journals in the scientific
community. And not every criticism made of
a paper is correct. Sometimes these image sleuths
are simply wrong in their understanding of their analysis.
(24:59):
But it's up to the journals and the scientists who studied Ozar
to set the record straight if they can.
But unfortunately, in a a very large percentage of cases, they
have genuinely found improper activity on the part of these
scientists. But if I could just digress for
a second, Jeff, and and respond briefly to your question about
whistleblowers. So whistleblowers are people who
(25:21):
come forward with original information about these studies,
often from inside the scientificenvironment where they were
produced, but not always. And they often take extreme
personal risks to do so. They could be risking their
careers, they could be risking their jobs, they could be
(25:42):
risking the possibility of legalaction against them from people
that they would be criticizing. And so often they're doing
things in AI think a quite heroic way.
For me as a journalist, I encounter whistleblowers all the
time. They come to me with problems
and concerns, but I have to say that it's it's only a minority
(26:04):
of them that are are willing to be even named publicly in an
article because of the risk thatthey run in doing so.
This guy, Matthew Shrag at Vanderbilt was one of those rare
breed of whistleblowers who, youknow, as a junior professor at
Vanderbilt, kind of staked his career by being willing to anger
(26:25):
the institutional authorities inhis field.
He, you know, he's an Alzheimer's scientist, and he
was challenging journals and topscientists in the field and the
National Institutes of Health who funds his homework and
others who have some real say soabout whether he can advance in
the field. And yet he felt that it was so
(26:47):
important to set the record straight and to get the field
away from ideas that may have been based on improper
information that he was willing to be named in my story and in
my book as an important element of how I tell the story about
false research and Alzheimer's. And you'll forgive me one small
(27:10):
description about the book itself.
Doctored is a investigative narrative.
And I I want readers to understand that even though
there is, of course, technical information in it and
descriptions of technical information, it's written for a
general audience. It's written for people who want
to follow the story of how theseproblems emerged from the
(27:32):
perspective of the players in the story, the people who were
implicated in possible wrongdoing, the people who
uncovered it, and how the drama unfolded.
So I would just encourage peoplenot at all to be intimidated by
the science of it. Yeah, it sounds like a
fascinating story and I've got to get the book and read it, and
I will. I'm excited for it to come out.
(27:55):
So how have these fraudulent studies misled Alzheimer's
Research and the funding over the last two decades?
Well, I mentioned the the genesis of the book had to do
with this so-called amyloid beta*56 study.
And this was the study in this journal Nature in 2006 that that
(28:17):
really set the field a bit on a path of reinvigorating the
amyloid hypothesis. That had been the subject of
some skepticism by then. Because already by then, for
more than a decade, a lot of tries have been done at
producing drugs that would Alzheimer's in an effective way.
(28:38):
And they'd failed one after the other had failed.
And it injected just as the drugwas injected into rats to 'cause
these memory problems, the studyitself injected into the field.
New Hope, a new determination and new belief that this special
kind of amyloid beta protein, I'm going to use this technical
(28:59):
term oligomer. It's a, a word that refers to
this kind of amyloid beta protein that can dissolve in a
cerebrospinal fluid. And it refers to a it's
molecular weight. So it's kind of a heavyweight
type of amyloid beta protein. The idea shifted to thinking
that was one of the key elementsto a knocking out the
(29:22):
Alzheimer's symptoms or slowing their progression.
And So what happened is that hundreds of millions of dollars
from the National Institute of Health almost right away,
ultimately amounting to billionsof dollars went into the studies
associated with amyloid beta oligomer proteins like *56.
(29:44):
And additionally, pharma companies put in billions of
dollars into fighting the disease based on that same
hypothesis, that same intellectual target, the style
of amyloid beta proteins as wellas the sticky plaque form that
accumulates in the brain. And so say that first of all, a
(30:08):
study that has been shown to have been based on image
manipulation, and I might add was in 2024 finally retracted as
a result of that study had profound influence in the field.
Now, it wasn't the only study, obviously the only study in that
field. There were many studies, some of
which gave people optimism. But this was the study that in a
(30:31):
way triggered this burst of activity to suggest that this
was the, the, the one true path to solving this problem.
So, so if I could play it out a little bit further just on this
one element of it that the the way this is played out is that
in the last couple years there have been finally a couple of
(30:54):
drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, 3 actually
have been approved that attack amyloid beta proteins.
And two are very significant approvals because they are what
the field calls disease modifying drugs.
So there's drugs on the market now that can treat symptoms of
(31:16):
Alzheimer's, for example, insomnia or agitation, which are
sometimes symptoms of the disease can be treated with
certain drugs with some effectiveness.
But when I say disease modifying, I mean a drug that
either stops, slows or reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
That's the kind of the ultimate goal of all this important drug
(31:39):
development. And so these three drugs were
approved. One has been withdrawed from the
market because it was dangerous and ineffective.
The two that are still on the market, 1 is called La Kembi,
and the other is called Kasunla.And La Kembi was the first one,
first of those two that was approved by the Food and Drug
(32:00):
Administration. And so it's based, both of them
are based on removing amyloid beta proteins from the brain.
And they both do an excellent job of removing particularly the
sticky plaque form of amyloid beta from the brain.
And so why were these approved? Well, they were approved because
in clinical studies with patients, Alzheimer's patients,
(32:24):
they found that that to a statistically significant degree
the pace of cognitive decline inpatients was slowed.
So when I say that, let me just be clear what I mean.
It meant that all of the patients in the study, those
being given the drug, the experimental drug, and those
(32:46):
being given the placebo, which is a treatment, a dummy
treatment that mimics the experimental treatment but is
really has no intended benefit. They found that those being
given the drug still declined. Their cognitive ability still
declined steadily, but at a slightly slower pace than the
(33:07):
people taking the placebo. This was shown to a
statistically significant degreebased on the testing, the
somewhat subjective testing thatis done of people's cognitive
abilities. So why would I not be then
enthusiastic about this? Even though it's not a cure,
it's something that could potentially benefit patients.
Well, there's a couple things tokeep in mind. 1 is that it had a
(33:30):
statistically significant benefit, but many doctors in
viewing the results of this drug, do not regard it as what
they call a clinically significant benefit.
In other words, the difference in the pace of cognitive decline
was so slight, so such a small difference that it was
(33:50):
imperceptible in many cases to patients, their families or
doctors. So many doctors won't prescribe
the drug at all because one, thebenefit is very low.
And you might ask yourself, well, why not try it?
Even if the benefit is uncertainor might be very subtle.
The reason is that it also has really serious hazards
(34:14):
associated with it, even including the risk of death from
brain swelling and bleeding or the risk of brain damage.
And so doctors who are prescribing this drug, they have
to ask themselves, how do I advise my patients to think
about this? Many patients are so terrified
of this disease that they might be willing to roll the dice.
(34:34):
And naturally that's their prerogative.
But I think many doctors are faced with the dilemma, is this
good advice to have them take a drug that they may not even see
any personal benefit from that could actually kill them?
And I know a lot about this in part because I wrote some of the
original stories about deaths within the trial for the first
(34:58):
of these drugs can be back a couple years ago where people in
the trial were dying of brain swelling and bleeding in
sometimes horrific manner. And these in the reporting and
the scientific studies that followed about them to the FDA
putting their most stringent warning on the PROC label for
(35:21):
these drugs. And that's what they call black
box warning denoting a risk of death.
So let's be clear, these drugs are on the market.
They're very expensive. Even if Medicare pays for them.
The co-pays are pretty high, many thousands per year.
But if you're not having insurance pay for it, including
the brain scans for safety and diagnostic reasons that you must
(35:43):
have with these drugs, it can amount to many 10s of thousands
of dollars per year per patient.I guess what I'm saying is that
this is an example of how in thethe degree of success we've had
has been very modest, even though billions and billions of
dollars have been invested in this amyloid hypothesis, in the
(36:05):
products that could result from them.
Yeah, It gets a little bit scaryhow once billions of dollars
have been invested into a drug, how often it's very hard to kind
of retract the progress or to put the brakes on the progress
because you feel like this has been spent.
We got to do something with it. So what role do agencies like
(36:26):
the FDA and and some of the big pharmaceutical companies play in
perpetuating these issues that you're talking about?
Yeah, that thanks for that question, Jeff.
It's a, it's a really at the heart of the matter.
So what we have here is a matterof sunk costs.
So when a company has invested billions of dollars into a line
(36:47):
of research or into drug development, really need to see
a return on their investment, even if the result is lackluster
or worse. And but there's another side to
it, which is that. Well, two other sides, really.
One is that because the field has been so dominated by the
amyloid hypothesis, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps
(37:10):
of scientists who have spent their entire careers studying
this idea and how to use it for public benefit in solving the
problem of Alzheimer's disease, so far without all that much
success. And as a result, their entire
careers are based on this idea that they have to continue to
(37:30):
support. Or, you know, they risk feeling
like their life's work has been leading them down a blind alley.
So there's enormous, you know, any human being might feel this
enormous psychological pressure to continue to prove out the
every little permutation of thisidea in a way that could
ultimately result in its success, even in the face of a
(37:53):
lot of failure, and also crowding out other possible
ideas for curing the disease. With regard to the institutions,
I just want to say that FDA, again, an institution that has
done a stellar job in many ways.I am not an FDA hater.
I like FDA's work in many realms, and I feel that they've
(38:14):
done an excellent job in protecting the American public
and the drug supply from unsafe medicines or from ineffective
medicines, even though they makemistakes and even though they
sometimes make, in my view, the wrong move.
But in this case, there is enormous pressure,
understandably enormous pressurefrom patients and from patient
(38:38):
advocates who, by the way, are often heavily funded by the drug
companies developing these drugsfor the FDA to act for them not
to slow down the approval of drugs because they might be
either too dangerous or so minimally effective for the cost
as to make them questionable. And so the agents feel enormous
(39:03):
pressure from the drug companiesthat are lobbying them, from
patient advocacy groups that arelobbying them, from Congress who
are saying we're spending all this money and grants, we need
to see some return on our investment.
That the temptation to let through drugs or let testing
continue on drugs despite apparent problems in the testing
(39:25):
process is just enormous on the agency.
And unfortunately they sometimes, in my opinion, don't
always make the right move as a result of that.
So how does the lack of consequences for the
perpetuators affect or feather the perpetrators, affect the
scientific community and the public trust in science?
(39:46):
Well, this is really the great tragedy of it, which is to say
that scientists and doctors havebeen, I think, really unfairly
been under attack by many peoplewho have political motives for
doing so. I do not subscribe to those
attacks. I am a, for example, a believer
(40:07):
that scientific research in areas like vaccines have been
some of the most important in human history for safeguarding
all of us from terrible illnesses.
That said, there's a lot of hubris in science.
There's a lot of attitude of like, trust us worthy experts.
(40:27):
And let's face it, trust has to be earned.
And scientists, like anyone, make mistakes.
They have problems. There are people in the ranks
who are dishonest. And the scientific institutions,
the journals, the universities, the federal government, the
regulators, they have not effectively policed the field.
(40:49):
And so as a result, they've ceded some of their moral
authority to be able to respond to concerns that are raised
about the field and to try to engender trust in the process
among members of the public. So what I think the good news is
that it's slowly changing. Those institutions are slowly
(41:10):
kind of getting a feeling that they're in some trouble in that
way. So I'm going to tell you one
reason why I'm somewhat discouraged and one reason why
I'm somewhat hopeful. So I want to mention this is a
story I did in about a guy by the name of Eliza Mosley, who
was previously the of the neuroscience division of the
(41:33):
National Institute on Aging. So that is a job that is
responsible for funding more Alzheimer's Church than any
other entity in the world. So they give more grants in that
realm than anybody else, billions of dollars per year.
And so this is a very important guy because his thinking and his
(41:55):
reasoning and his leadership andjudgement had been for years at
the pinnacle of the grant makinginstitutions that we rely on for
the furtherance of thoughtful, incisive research that could
ultimately lead to treatments and cures for the disease.
And my reporting in conjunction with Matthew Schrag and three
(42:21):
other illustrious image sleuths,if you want to call them that,
Elizabeth Bick, Kevin Patrick and you, Liu Yang, a dossier was
developed on his work associatedwith his vast contributions to
neuroscience. This is a guy who had written
like 800 scientific papers, not all of them, but a fairly large
(42:44):
chunk of those were looked at bythat team led by the pioneering
work of Liu Yang at Columbia University.
And these sleuths found that 132of his papers had been
apparently based on image doctoring.
It's shocking really, because this guy at the pinnacle of
(43:05):
funding of the field was himselfimplicated in a, a just, you
know, really elaborate set of problems.
And when my story came out the day it came out, he had to be
forced out of his job. So the epilogue, in a sense of
this little anecdote is that I went to the National Institutes
(43:27):
of Health, which is the overall agency that sits above the
National Institute on Aging, which is was the agency that
Mosley was part of. And I asked them when he was
hired. Or when other senior people at
your agency are hired, do you just do a routine check for
possible image doctoring or other kinds of potential
(43:49):
scientific misconduct before hiring people for these high
posts? The answer was no, we didn't.
No, we don't, and we don't thinkit would be helpful.
And to me, this was a shocking kind of arrogant complacency in
the light of this scandal that they had just faced with one of
their top leaders. So to me, that is the
(44:10):
discouraging side of the story, that we still have a kind of a
sense of entitlement almost fromsome of the agencies that they
they just haven't taken matters into hand in an appropriate way.
The plus side is that I think journals and to some degree
universities are taking these issues more seriously.
(44:31):
Journals are starting to adopt software that can look at images
quickly and give them a hint as to whether there might be
problems that they need to address in a more determined
way. And so that's one good sign.
The other good sign is that people are looking over their
shoulders. The rise of this of image
(44:53):
sleuths, in my view, has been a positive sign in the scientific
community that that it's just important to Crowdsource some of
these things. The problems are too large.
The issues are too large. Now, that is not to say that
every finding by these people iscorrect.
And it's not to say that they sometimes don't engage in
(45:15):
accesses like personal attacks on scientists that I would think
are not at all warranted and often are counterproductive.
But I would say the vast majority of people who are part
of this community of image solutes are respectful and
deeply determined merely to expose fraud or misconduct and
research in a way that could correct the scientific record.
(45:37):
And to the degree that we can begin to correct the record, we
can really unwind from some of its terrible effects and move
the field forward much faster. By exposing incorrect
information, the field can, in asense, cleanse itself and move
forward more rapidly. And that's really what it's all
about, to help serve the people who are living with Alzheimer's,
(46:00):
their families and our own future much, much better.
So from your experience, what motivates these salutes and
these image individuals that youwere talking about, what what
motivates them to to do what they do and how are they really
making a difference? Well, I think, you know, it's a
diverse group like like any group of people.
(46:21):
But I would say that, you know, the image sleuths are people
who, you know, question authority, are not afraid or
intimidated by authority, who are also themselves technically
interested. A lot of them are not
scientists. They're just people who know how
to use software and know how to to look critically at images and
(46:41):
try to understand how they were constructed or how they were
tampered with. And, you know, I would say
they're mostly hobbyists, just people who have fun doing this
and want to make a contribution.And in a general way, you know,
like any group of people, like scientists, the vast majority of
them have good intentions, are thoughtful and would like to see
(47:04):
an improvement of the field. You know, there's some who
don't. There's some who are cavalier or
unfair and and perhaps antagonistic to some of the
targets of their examinations. But look, that's the way it is.
And with humanity, we're, we're a diverse group, OK?
So my next question, I, I, I don't want to bring politics
into it or any of that kind of stuff, but I, I think we are
(47:28):
kind of looking at a potential pendulum swing here in the next
administration. But with that being said, what
role can policy makers, healthcare professionals play in
ensuring a greater accountability and transparency?
Yeah, that that's a terrific question that I've been, you
(47:49):
know, fretting about myself. And the reason I've been
fretting is that I think we're, you know, there is both
potential and danger in the coming period.
And so we have to face facts. A lot of these institutions,
including the National Institutes of Health and the
FDA, have not done as good a jobas they they must do to root out
(48:12):
misconduct or fraud in studies that they examine the fund and
approve for drug development. And so step one is to fund and
encourage and equip the agenciesto do a much better job of that
and to insist upon it. And that is something, you know,
forceful new administrators at those agencies can and should
(48:35):
do. I think there's been complacency
and a a sense of arrogance that has to be corrected.
So that's something that I wouldwelcome.
What I would not welcome is an attitude of or restricting the
scientific judgement of many of the experts in these agencies
(48:56):
who have done, in my view, in most cases, an excellent job of
scouting out ideas, of providingrigorous review to important
drugs. These are not institutions you
want to mess with so much that they can't do their jobs
effectively. Look, I have written about the
FDA and the NIH critically many times.
I've done numerous investigations about their
(49:19):
failings and the failings of theCDC.
But I do it from a a perspectiveof the work that they do that we
all benefit from and insisting that they do better.
It's our obligation to do that. And look, if we if people who
are supportive of these agencies, don't criticize them
up from a perspective of support, you might say, don't
(49:42):
expose problems that they might not even be aware of themselves.
From a perspective of we want these institutions to do their
jobs better than people who basically want to use them or
misuse them for political purposes or destroy important
programs to meet the needs of some perceived or actual
constituency that they think they have, then those people
(50:06):
will have free reign. We have to find an approach that
strengthens the institutions andmakes them do better, not hacks
away at them in a way that will create really desperate needs
for better intervention. So shifting gears a bit, and we
ask this of all our guests, whatare you doing personally to age
(50:26):
well? OK, well, I've got two things
that I think are keeping me younger than I would otherwise
be. 1 is that I am fascinated bythe work that I do, and I feel
very privileged to have a platform where I can think
deeply, spend an enormous amountof time learning about new
(50:47):
things in science and stretchingmy brain to try to interpret it
for the public. That is a great gift that I've
been given through my hard work,of course, but also I know that
so many others in society would like to be making those kinds of
contributions and even though they're well qualified, they
haven't been able to. So I'm very happy and I feel
very privileged about that. The other thing is that keeps me
(51:10):
going in that way and keeps me young is spending an enormous
amount of time with my two year old granddaughter who is one of
the loves of my life and she's amazing and she also forces me
to stay in the moment. That's what 2 year olds do and
it's a great gift to me as well.Hey, Kurt.
So an important part of aging well is kind of living in the
(51:32):
moment. Indeed it is.
Not living in the past, not living too far in the future.
So is someone who is so deeply immersed in this investigation
what gives you hope for the future of Alzheimer's Research
and patient care? Well, a few things.
One is that I think notwithstanding the dominance of
(51:52):
the amyloid hypothesis, which issomething that I'm not
suggesting should be completely abandoned.
Obviously it's obvious that amyloid proteins have something
to do with Alzheimer's, but I'm encouraged that there's the
start of much more diversified research going on.
Some interest in things like possible the what's called the
infection hypothesis, that Alzheimer's might be related to
(52:15):
brain infections. Also the inflammation hypothesis
that different causes of inflammation might be
contributing to the development of Alzheimer's, dementia and
others. And in fact, there's some pretty
fascinating studies that are coming out soon. 1 related to
the GLP one inhibitor drugs. These are the weight loss drugs
that have been yielding what some people are calling kind of
(52:38):
seeming up miraculous, seeminglymiraculous benefits.
They're now being tested as possible remedies for dementia.
And so I guess what I'm saying is that never underestimate the
power of creative thinking of the scientific community that is
going to help us in the future. The second is never
underestimate the determination of image sleuths to root out
(53:03):
potentially bad behavior and to make sure that attention is
called to it, and slowly but surely force the scientific
community to do some self policing that is more effective.
Those are two things that give me a lot of hope for the future.
Even though a cure for Alzheimer's I think is still a
ways off, I think we should all at least hold out some hope for
(53:25):
ourselves that there is this isn't an endless problem.
That's good. And there's any upcoming
projects or areas of investigation you're excited to
share? Well, unfortunately I can't
share what I'm working on now. It's just sort of the the thing
about I can't pre disclose stuffthat's going to happen in the
future in my field. So it just means we got to watch
(53:47):
your work and watch for all the,you know, great projects coming
out, right? I'd be very grateful if you did.
You can find me on in the my webpage on Science magazine and
also, of course, my books comingout.
When you listen to this, it'll be out and I'll be, you know,
very eager to hear any feedback that readers might have.
(54:10):
And we'll have links to that andto your website and you do any
social media or anything else like that.
I do. I'm on I'm on Twitter and
starting to get going on Blue Sky.
All right. Well, is there anything we
missed today? I feel like we talked about so
much, but I want to make sure you have your voice fully spoken
today. No, I really appreciate the
(54:31):
opportunity, Jeff. I think your questions were the
the right ones to get to the heart of the matter and I'm very
appreciative to have the time taken to get a look at the work
that I'm doing. All right, well, when you have
so that more that I was going tosay more important work, but
it's not really more important work.
The additional important work that you have coming out in the
(54:52):
future is that comes out, you know, keep us in mind and you
know, we'd love to have you share it here with us because,
you know, we want people to get the right information to be able
to age well. And I think.
You're providing that information, so we thank you for
that. OK.
Thank you again for your interest.
Thank you for listening. I hope you benefited from
today's podcast and until next time, keep aging well.
In this episode of the Aging World Podcast, we are joined by
award-winning investigative journalist Charles Pillar to
discuss his forthcoming expose, doctored fraud, arrogance and
Tragedy in the quest to cure Alzheimer's.
This groundbreaking work revealshow scientific misconduct and
systematic greed have derailed Alzheimer's Research, wasting
billions of dollars and and decades of potential progress.
(00:27):
Charles brings us into the worldof whistleblowers, fraudulent
research, and the critical fightto reclaim integrity and
science. Together, we'll explore the
profound implications for his findings, not only for
Alzheimer's patients and their families, but for the future of
scientific research as a whole. If you care about public health,
science, and truth, this is a conversation you won't want to
miss. Charles, welcome to the Aging
(00:51):
World podcast. Can you start by just telling us
a little bit about yourself and how you came to be a journalist
blowing the whistle on scientific research?
Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me and I
appreciate being here. Sure, I have been working as a
journalist on scientific and technical subjects for many
(01:12):
years. I've reported on a lot of things
in my career, but maybe for the last 15 plus years I've been
strongly focused on science, a lot of stuff related to
Biological Sciences, which is a long story in my career.
I many years ago was doing a lotof work on biological warfare
(01:34):
issues and wrote a book on that,and in recent years I've been
working for that specialize in medicine and Biological
Sciences. In particular, I work for STAT,
which is a website that covers medicine quite extensively.
And the last few years I've beenat Science magazine where we
(01:54):
have a focus in particular on research, and my area has been
looking at biological research and also clinical research.
That's experiments involving people to test the safety and
efficacy of drugs. So what inspired you to delve
into the world of investigative journalism, and particularly in
(02:16):
the realm of public health and science?
Well, at the risk of dating myself, I'm old enough to have
been inspired by the reportage of the Watergate reporters back
in the 70s, and I was a kid. But I know I read that stuff.
I heard about it and it kind of prompted me to want to try to
(02:38):
use journalism in a way that could benefit society by
exposing wrongdoing or problems just that require some
attention. Because I've always had a bit of
a technical bent, could say my personality, I'm interested in
technical subjects. I've always been curious to try
(03:00):
to figure out how do you describe a complex set of
information about science or technology to a general
audience, to people who are curious but don't have the time
to become an expert themselves. And so I view myself as someone
who both uncovers information about potential challenges,
(03:23):
problems, issues in the world ofscience, but also who can
communicate it in a clear, coherent and I hope, pretty easy
to understand way to people who are my readers.
That's going to be especially challenging in this age of
TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts.
True enough, true enough. I have to tip my hat to some of
(03:46):
the folks who are truly experts in bringing a complex science to
the masses. But I'm more of a word guy.
But I do the best I can. I like the words too.
So, can you share how your reporting for science has LED
you to uncover this web of misconduct in Alzheimer's
Research? Yeah, I'd be happy to do that.
So started in 2021, and I was tipped by kind of an indirect
(04:13):
group via a colleague of mine toa source who understood well and
was involved in exposing apparent misconduct associated
with an Alzheimer's drug. The drug, the name of the drug
is Simufilum, and it was produced by a company called
Cassava Sciences. And a complaint was made to the
(04:34):
Food and Drug Administration, which is the agency, as people
probably know, that administers and regulates the approval and
warnings associated with a prescription drugs and some
other drugs as well. And after a series of
conversations with this particular guy who had been
(04:55):
looking into a problems associated with science behind
the drug. And, and when I say problems, I
mean apparent misconduct associated with manipulation of
images in the scientific papers that supported the development
of the drug. So in other words, you know what
you might call in simple terms, possible fraud in the
(05:17):
development of the drug. In my communications with him, I
learned from him that there weresome bigger questions in the
field, bigger questions initially associated with a set
of important research, in particular a very famous and
very highly cited study in the journal Nature, which is one of
(05:42):
the most important scientific journals in the world.
And this study involved a kind of a proof of concept for the
most important, most dominant hypothesis in the field of
Alzheimer's Research. It's called the amyloid
hypothesis and I can explain, ifI may very briefly, what that
(06:03):
is. So the thinking behind this
so-called amyloid hypothesis is that a certain type of proteins
called amyloid beta proteins accumulate in the brain and they
can take a couple different forms.
One is the kind of infamous sticky plaques.
These are deposits of amyloid proteins in the brain and also a
(06:26):
form that can dissolve in cerebro spinal fluid, which is
what the brain is bathed in. And that's a a different kind of
amyloid beta protein. But both of these are regarded
as something that set into placea series of biochemical changes
in the brain that lead ultimately to Alzheimer's
(06:49):
dementia. And so this idea, which is a
pretty interesting idea that hada fair amount of scientific
bases and support, became very well accepted as not just a
hypothesis, but for decades, forthe last several decades, the
dominant way of looking at the disease.
(07:10):
So just to take again, I'm sorry, one step back to this
scientific study in Nature. This was published in 1996, so
it was a long time ago. I'm, I'm sorry, forgive me, I'm
I'm a decade off. It was published in 2006, still
a long time ago, but not quite as far back.
This involved an experiment withmice and rats.
(07:33):
And basically what it did is it used mice that had been
genetically engineered to produce copious amounts of this
amyloid beta protein in their brains.
And the idea is to create mice that in a way mimicked the
symptoms of Alzheimer's disease as an experimental model.
Very typical kind of approach inBiological Sciences.
(07:56):
And So what the scientists did, and these were scientists at the
University of Minnesota, they extracted something they called
amyloid beta *56, a very precisetype of amyloid beta protein,
very precise with its own certain characteristics.
And then they described an experiment where they purified
(08:19):
this protein and then injected into rats.
And what they claimed was the rats then very quickly showed
memory problems that they compared to some of the decline
in memory among Alzheimer's patients.
So what you had was a kind of example, the first example, if
(08:39):
you will, experimentally of A cause and effect relationship
between amyloid beta proteins and Alzheimer's disease, albeit
in in rodents, not in people. And So what whistleblower who I
was talking with was learning, and his name is Matthew Schrag.
He's a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University who has
(09:02):
become an important researcher in research integrity in the
field. And I might add that Matthew,
who I've been working with now for several years on, he does
his image integrity and researchintegrity work separate from his
day job as a professor at Vanderbilt.
So what he was learning was thisparticular study in 2006, this
(09:25):
famous study in nature that had been extremely influential and
had kicked off hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions
of dollars in funding to furtherinvestigate and prove out the
amyloid hypothesis associated with this certain type of
amyloid protein. And it had really steered a lot
(09:47):
of thinking in the field to validate this hypothesis at a
moment when it was beginning to find a lot of skepticism against
it and because it had been trying for a long time to
develop drugs or vaccines to treat Alzheimer's without
success. So what he found was that
(10:08):
several of the key images withinthis scientific study had been
altered, apparently digitally altered in ways that described
the experiment as successful. And yet when you alter images
improperly to support your experimental hypothesis, it
(10:29):
really pretty much says that youdon't have the support that you
need. This was, in fact, if this was
done, it would be a form of extreme scientific misconduct.
So this was the genesis of my interest in this.
And So what ultimately resulted was a story that I did in
science. And science, as your listeners
(10:52):
may know, is also one of the leading scholarly journals in
the world. Of course, we also have a
journalism side of the magazine.That's the part I work for.
I'm not a scientist, don't play one on TVI am simply journalist
working on investigative storiesabout these kinds of matters.
And then they're published in Science magazine and now in my
(11:14):
book Doctor. So just to cut the story short
to the chase, I should say, the story is published in Science in
July of 2022. And it caused kind of a gigantic
explosion of both in the scientific community because it
cast doubt on a prevailing hypothesis in this important
(11:38):
disease. But also it had ramifications
beyond into the world of the families, the people who are
living with Alzheimer's, doctorswho are treating Alzheimer's
patients. It basically raised a lot of
concern about whether there had been incorrect thinking in the
(11:59):
field for many years that had wasted time, wasted scientific
thinking and billions of dollarsin investment.
So that got me off on a much bigger look at the whole panoply
of studies and ideas within Alzheimer's.
And I had to ask myself the question if this important study
(12:21):
had apparently been doctored andwhat more might there be in the
field to look at? What other possible examples
might there be of apparent misconduct that could could have
had deleterious effects on the way people think about the
disease and how drugs are developed?
And that got me off on a how long chase that resulted
(12:43):
ultimately in my book. And there's lots of other
examples that I was able to uncover and describe in the book
as well as in the pages of Science magazine.
So the subtitle of your book refers to fraud, arrogance, and
tragedy. How do these elements intertwine
in the story you uncovered? Well, thanks for that question,
Jeff. I think it's very the
(13:04):
intertwining aspect is very important.
So what you have are a few factors.
One is you have the dominance ofa single set of ideas called the
amyloid hypothesis within the field.
Doesn't mean that it's exclusiveof every other way of thinking
about Alzheimer's. Obviously, the world is big,
diverse, and complicated. No single idea can completely
(13:27):
dominate. But when you have an idea that
has got such support in the scientific community and among
funders, regulators, universities and the scientific
hierarchy, if you will, including journals, it exerts an
enormous amount of force and pushes people in the direction
of studying it to the exclusion of other, perhaps promising
(13:51):
ideas. So when I say arrogance, what I
partly mean is this kind of sense of certainty that we have
the one true idea about this disease to the exclusion of
other ideas. So I think that arrogance played
a role in the problem we have, which is that there have been no
(14:12):
good drugs developed for Alzheimer's really ever.
There are some drugs in the market and I can very closely
describe those when we get further into the conversation.
But just to go back to your question about these three
issues, fraud, arrogance and tragedy.
Well, the fraud is that, as I described in Doctored, there are
(14:33):
hundreds, perhaps thousands of examples of Doctored studies
just in the work that I did withthe collaboration of some
expert, what we call image sleuths, people who are forensic
image analysts who can look at scientific images and understand
whether they have been improperly altered.
(14:54):
Just for Doctored, we looked at thousands and thousands of
images that seem to have been improperly altered in important
studies related to Alzheimer's disease.
So even though it's still, you know, a small percentage of the
overall body of work for the field, you have to ask yourself
the question. If we were able to find all of
(15:15):
these apparently doctored imagesthat had the effect of
suggesting truth within scientific experiments
improperly, it really raises some bigger questions about how
reliable the body of research isoverall in the field.
So, and there's a couple of examples I can talk about later
(15:35):
that really bring that home. But just to get to the third
pole of your question, tragedy, What is the tragedy?
Well, as millions of Americans who are living with Alzheimer's
and many millions of their lovedones who are caring for them
know, this is one of the most horrible diseases that we've
(15:55):
ever encountered. It steals people's first their
memories, then their ability to have normal relationships with
their loved ones there, and eventually a kind of theft of
their sense of self that makes each one of us human.
And because of that tragic sequence within the illness,
(16:17):
it's a terrifying 1. And the scientific community,
the medical community, owes thispatient population and owes all
of us a kind of determination tothink broadly about these issues
and about what the possible solutions would be.
So if I could just use briefly akind of agricultural analogy
(16:39):
that I think people might want to think about it in regard to
this problem of why is it a problem to focus so closely on a
single hypothesis? Well, if you think about farmers
and how they grow crops, they don't grow the same crop on the
same field year after year afteryear after year for fear of
(17:00):
depleting the nutrition in the soil.
And in a sense, what an over concentration of work on one
hypothesis in this scientific field, the amyloid hypothesis,
it can create a kind of scientific monoculture, if you
will, that depletes the surrounding area of intellectual
creativity for other kinds of ideas.
(17:23):
So I would say those three things, the fraud that implies,
that describes the part of the book that that details dozens
and dozens of scientists whose work is now, I think, challenged
and questionable. The tragedy, of course, is the
patients and their loved ones who are waiting, hoping for a
(17:46):
remedy that has real effectiveness.
And the arrogance is the idea that people feel that they're so
right that they kind of crowd out other creative thinking.
And I would imagine that your work is really just exposed the
tip of an iceberg, and there's probably a lot more deeper stuff
going on throughout science and throughout, you know,
(18:06):
pharmacological development and all that kind of stuff.
Can you describe the role of whistleblowers like Matthew
Shrag? Was it?
Yes, Shrag. Matthew Shrag and their role in
kind of exposing fraudulent practices and Alzheimer's
Research and really other areas of science.
Yeah, I I'd be happy to. Before I describe my work with
(18:29):
whistleblowers and what their contribution has been, I'd like
to say first of all that I thinkit would be a mistake to assume
that because some research has been apparently product of
misconduct or even fraud, that you can paint a broader, much
broader brush with it. We don't know for sure.
We know that while there is fraud and misconduct in
(18:50):
Alzheimer's Research, I certainly don't think it's more
than in other fields of research, nor do I think it's
more than in any other walk of life.
We know that almost every field has people who are corrupt or
who are willing to cut corners, who are willing to rationalize
themselves that somehow their thinking is so important that
(19:13):
it's OK for them to do things that other people would regard
as improper. But I still think that most
scientists in the field are deeply determined to do the
right thing and to be genuine researchers of important
scientific ideas, even if they might, you know, disagree with
each other or even make mistakes.
(19:33):
We all make mistakes, so I wouldbe hesitant to paint too broad a
brush with this. The second thing I wanted to say
is that even though my book describes an enormous amount of
failure by the institutional authorities of science, and when
I say institutional authorities,I mean the federal regulators,
the funders, the journals and the universities that have been
(19:56):
very complacent and have not properly addressed the issue.
Of both image integrity and scientific integrity more
generally among the people in their ranks.
So while I'm very critical of their inactivity, their
lassitude, their complacency, I still want to say that we have a
(20:19):
robust and I think very effective compared to the rest
of the world, most of the rest of the world, very effective way
of evaluating possible drugs forhuman use.
We have a very robust and I think very effective
infrastructure for studying medical and scientific questions
(20:39):
that have reaped an enormous reward.
So I just want to be clear that I am not a critic of the entire
scientific establishment. I believe I focused clearly on
some some lapses, some blind spots and some corruption that
needs to be exposed. So, so I'm sorry for that long
digression, Jeff. No, that's quite all right.
(21:00):
And I agree with you and I, but I do think that, you know, it's
good to have that skepticism because I think too often we
have too much trust in the scientific community and you
know, the companies that are developing drugs and the FDA and
all this kind of stuff. And it's important that we have
people like you that are are testing that integrity and
(21:21):
challenging it and making sure that we're getting the
information. I think that it is honest and
legitimate and that it's not tarnishing the reputations of
good scientists that are out there.
Thank you for saying that. I, I do agree.
And I think just to tie back to your question about
whistleblowers. So why are there whistleblowers
(21:43):
and why are there people who I have called image sleuths?
That's what they often call themselves.
As I mentioned, the gatekeepers and the authorities of science
have not done a good job of policing possible misconduct and
image manipulation. And So what has happened, and
this is so often the case today given the rise of social media,
(22:07):
the Internet, and the kind of new constellation of thinking
that has often been stimulated by that.
What we've seen is that an imagesleuths have formed a, you know,
kind of a cottage industry of policing the field because it's
not being well policed by the authorities that are should be
doing the work. And let me just give you an
(22:28):
example. The scholarly journals have been
very late to the game and understanding how important it
is to check the images that are submitted to them for possible
fraud and reviewers, which are the people who review these
studies before they're included in scholarly journals.
They look at the studies, they provide feedback.
(22:50):
These are subject matter expertswithin the the particular field.
These are folks who we depend onfor their intellectual integrity
and for their knowledge to make sure that the work that finds
its way into the scientific record is good.
It's well founded and it's been well checked.
But they're not trained to look at images with a critical eye.
(23:10):
They're not trained to see, oh, there may have been improper
alterations in these images meant to support the
experimental hypothesis in an improper way.
And So what has happened is thatthese image sleuths, a kind of a
army of them, a small army from all over the world, have
(23:31):
developed the skill to do that image analysis.
And a lot of the information that they find is posted to a
website called Hub Peer PUBPR, if anyone wants to look it up.
And this is a website that is a kind of a discussion site for
scientific studies. And the suspect images are
(23:52):
posted up there often with questions for the researchers,
saying things like these images don't look right to me in this
way or in that way. Can the authors of the study
please check and respond? And usually they're presented in
a way as a question because it can be very hard to know with
certainty whether an image has been improperly altered without
(24:15):
having the original high resolution images that were
produced for the experiment. Unfortunately, so often the
experimenters won't supply thoseoriginal images.
And so in my opinion that it's apretty bad look.
They need to be more forthcoming.
So what you've seen is an explosion of interest from these
(24:37):
image sleuths, many of them anonymously posting to this
site, pub peer, that has caused a real crisis of confidence
within many of the scholarly journals in the scientific
community. And not every criticism made of
a paper is correct. Sometimes these image sleuths
are simply wrong in their understanding of their analysis.
(24:59):
But it's up to the journals and the scientists who studied Ozar
to set the record straight if they can.
But unfortunately, in a a very large percentage of cases, they
have genuinely found improper activity on the part of these
scientists. But if I could just digress for
a second, Jeff, and and respond briefly to your question about
whistleblowers. So whistleblowers are people who
(25:21):
come forward with original information about these studies,
often from inside the scientificenvironment where they were
produced, but not always. And they often take extreme
personal risks to do so. They could be risking their
careers, they could be risking their jobs, they could be
(25:42):
risking the possibility of legalaction against them from people
that they would be criticizing. And so often they're doing
things in AI think a quite heroic way.
For me as a journalist, I encounter whistleblowers all the
time. They come to me with problems
and concerns, but I have to say that it's it's only a minority
(26:04):
of them that are are willing to be even named publicly in an
article because of the risk thatthey run in doing so.
This guy, Matthew Shrag at Vanderbilt was one of those rare
breed of whistleblowers who, youknow, as a junior professor at
Vanderbilt, kind of staked his career by being willing to anger
(26:25):
the institutional authorities inhis field.
He, you know, he's an Alzheimer's scientist, and he
was challenging journals and topscientists in the field and the
National Institutes of Health who funds his homework and
others who have some real say soabout whether he can advance in
the field. And yet he felt that it was so
(26:47):
important to set the record straight and to get the field
away from ideas that may have been based on improper
information that he was willing to be named in my story and in
my book as an important element of how I tell the story about
false research and Alzheimer's. And you'll forgive me one small
(27:10):
description about the book itself.
Doctored is a investigative narrative.
And I I want readers to understand that even though
there is, of course, technical information in it and
descriptions of technical information, it's written for a
general audience. It's written for people who want
to follow the story of how theseproblems emerged from the
(27:32):
perspective of the players in the story, the people who were
implicated in possible wrongdoing, the people who
uncovered it, and how the drama unfolded.
So I would just encourage peoplenot at all to be intimidated by
the science of it. Yeah, it sounds like a
fascinating story and I've got to get the book and read it, and
I will. I'm excited for it to come out.
(27:55):
So how have these fraudulent studies misled Alzheimer's
Research and the funding over the last two decades?
Well, I mentioned the the genesis of the book had to do
with this so-called amyloid beta*56 study.
And this was the study in this journal Nature in 2006 that that
(28:17):
really set the field a bit on a path of reinvigorating the
amyloid hypothesis. That had been the subject of
some skepticism by then. Because already by then, for
more than a decade, a lot of tries have been done at
producing drugs that would Alzheimer's in an effective way.
(28:38):
And they'd failed one after the other had failed.
And it injected just as the drugwas injected into rats to 'cause
these memory problems, the studyitself injected into the field.
New Hope, a new determination and new belief that this special
kind of amyloid beta protein, I'm going to use this technical
(28:59):
term oligomer. It's a, a word that refers to
this kind of amyloid beta protein that can dissolve in a
cerebrospinal fluid. And it refers to a it's
molecular weight. So it's kind of a heavyweight
type of amyloid beta protein. The idea shifted to thinking
that was one of the key elementsto a knocking out the
(29:22):
Alzheimer's symptoms or slowing their progression.
And So what happened is that hundreds of millions of dollars
from the National Institute of Health almost right away,
ultimately amounting to billionsof dollars went into the studies
associated with amyloid beta oligomer proteins like *56.
(29:44):
And additionally, pharma companies put in billions of
dollars into fighting the disease based on that same
hypothesis, that same intellectual target, the style
of amyloid beta proteins as wellas the sticky plaque form that
accumulates in the brain. And so say that first of all, a
(30:08):
study that has been shown to have been based on image
manipulation, and I might add was in 2024 finally retracted as
a result of that study had profound influence in the field.
Now, it wasn't the only study, obviously the only study in that
field. There were many studies, some of
which gave people optimism. But this was the study that in a
(30:31):
way triggered this burst of activity to suggest that this
was the, the, the one true path to solving this problem.
So, so if I could play it out a little bit further just on this
one element of it that the the way this is played out is that
in the last couple years there have been finally a couple of
(30:54):
drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration, 3 actually
have been approved that attack amyloid beta proteins.
And two are very significant approvals because they are what
the field calls disease modifying drugs.
So there's drugs on the market now that can treat symptoms of
(31:16):
Alzheimer's, for example, insomnia or agitation, which are
sometimes symptoms of the disease can be treated with
certain drugs with some effectiveness.
But when I say disease modifying, I mean a drug that
either stops, slows or reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer's.
That's the kind of the ultimate goal of all this important drug
(31:39):
development. And so these three drugs were
approved. One has been withdrawed from the
market because it was dangerous and ineffective.
The two that are still on the market, 1 is called La Kembi,
and the other is called Kasunla.And La Kembi was the first one,
first of those two that was approved by the Food and Drug
(32:00):
Administration. And so it's based, both of them
are based on removing amyloid beta proteins from the brain.
And they both do an excellent job of removing particularly the
sticky plaque form of amyloid beta from the brain.
And so why were these approved? Well, they were approved because
in clinical studies with patients, Alzheimer's patients,
(32:24):
they found that that to a statistically significant degree
the pace of cognitive decline inpatients was slowed.
So when I say that, let me just be clear what I mean.
It meant that all of the patients in the study, those
being given the drug, the experimental drug, and those
(32:46):
being given the placebo, which is a treatment, a dummy
treatment that mimics the experimental treatment but is
really has no intended benefit. They found that those being
given the drug still declined. Their cognitive ability still
declined steadily, but at a slightly slower pace than the
(33:07):
people taking the placebo. This was shown to a
statistically significant degreebased on the testing, the
somewhat subjective testing thatis done of people's cognitive
abilities. So why would I not be then
enthusiastic about this? Even though it's not a cure,
it's something that could potentially benefit patients.
Well, there's a couple things tokeep in mind. 1 is that it had a
(33:30):
statistically significant benefit, but many doctors in
viewing the results of this drug, do not regard it as what
they call a clinically significant benefit.
In other words, the difference in the pace of cognitive decline
was so slight, so such a small difference that it was
(33:50):
imperceptible in many cases to patients, their families or
doctors. So many doctors won't prescribe
the drug at all because one, thebenefit is very low.
And you might ask yourself, well, why not try it?
Even if the benefit is uncertainor might be very subtle.
The reason is that it also has really serious hazards
(34:14):
associated with it, even including the risk of death from
brain swelling and bleeding or the risk of brain damage.
And so doctors who are prescribing this drug, they have
to ask themselves, how do I advise my patients to think
about this? Many patients are so terrified
of this disease that they might be willing to roll the dice.
(34:34):
And naturally that's their prerogative.
But I think many doctors are faced with the dilemma, is this
good advice to have them take a drug that they may not even see
any personal benefit from that could actually kill them?
And I know a lot about this in part because I wrote some of the
original stories about deaths within the trial for the first
(34:58):
of these drugs can be back a couple years ago where people in
the trial were dying of brain swelling and bleeding in
sometimes horrific manner. And these in the reporting and
the scientific studies that followed about them to the FDA
putting their most stringent warning on the PROC label for
(35:21):
these drugs. And that's what they call black
box warning denoting a risk of death.
So let's be clear, these drugs are on the market.
They're very expensive. Even if Medicare pays for them.
The co-pays are pretty high, many thousands per year.
But if you're not having insurance pay for it, including
the brain scans for safety and diagnostic reasons that you must
(35:43):
have with these drugs, it can amount to many 10s of thousands
of dollars per year per patient.I guess what I'm saying is that
this is an example of how in thethe degree of success we've had
has been very modest, even though billions and billions of
dollars have been invested in this amyloid hypothesis, in the
(36:05):
products that could result from them.
Yeah, It gets a little bit scaryhow once billions of dollars
have been invested into a drug, how often it's very hard to kind
of retract the progress or to put the brakes on the progress
because you feel like this has been spent.
We got to do something with it. So what role do agencies like
(36:26):
the FDA and and some of the big pharmaceutical companies play in
perpetuating these issues that you're talking about?
Yeah, that thanks for that question, Jeff.
It's a, it's a really at the heart of the matter.
So what we have here is a matterof sunk costs.
So when a company has invested billions of dollars into a line
(36:47):
of research or into drug development, really need to see
a return on their investment, even if the result is lackluster
or worse. And but there's another side to
it, which is that. Well, two other sides, really.
One is that because the field has been so dominated by the
amyloid hypothesis, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps
(37:10):
of scientists who have spent their entire careers studying
this idea and how to use it for public benefit in solving the
problem of Alzheimer's disease, so far without all that much
success. And as a result, their entire
careers are based on this idea that they have to continue to
(37:30):
support. Or, you know, they risk feeling
like their life's work has been leading them down a blind alley.
So there's enormous, you know, any human being might feel this
enormous psychological pressure to continue to prove out the
every little permutation of thisidea in a way that could
ultimately result in its success, even in the face of a
(37:53):
lot of failure, and also crowding out other possible
ideas for curing the disease. With regard to the institutions,
I just want to say that FDA, again, an institution that has
done a stellar job in many ways.I am not an FDA hater.
I like FDA's work in many realms, and I feel that they've
(38:14):
done an excellent job in protecting the American public
and the drug supply from unsafe medicines or from ineffective
medicines, even though they makemistakes and even though they
sometimes make, in my view, the wrong move.
But in this case, there is enormous pressure,
understandably enormous pressurefrom patients and from patient
(38:38):
advocates who, by the way, are often heavily funded by the drug
companies developing these drugsfor the FDA to act for them not
to slow down the approval of drugs because they might be
either too dangerous or so minimally effective for the cost
as to make them questionable. And so the agents feel enormous
(39:03):
pressure from the drug companiesthat are lobbying them, from
patient advocacy groups that arelobbying them, from Congress who
are saying we're spending all this money and grants, we need
to see some return on our investment.
That the temptation to let through drugs or let testing
continue on drugs despite apparent problems in the testing
(39:25):
process is just enormous on the agency.
And unfortunately they sometimes, in my opinion, don't
always make the right move as a result of that.
So how does the lack of consequences for the
perpetuators affect or feather the perpetrators, affect the
scientific community and the public trust in science?
(39:46):
Well, this is really the great tragedy of it, which is to say
that scientists and doctors havebeen, I think, really unfairly
been under attack by many peoplewho have political motives for
doing so. I do not subscribe to those
attacks. I am a, for example, a believer
(40:07):
that scientific research in areas like vaccines have been
some of the most important in human history for safeguarding
all of us from terrible illnesses.
That said, there's a lot of hubris in science.
There's a lot of attitude of like, trust us worthy experts.
(40:27):
And let's face it, trust has to be earned.
And scientists, like anyone, make mistakes.
They have problems. There are people in the ranks
who are dishonest. And the scientific institutions,
the journals, the universities, the federal government, the
regulators, they have not effectively policed the field.
(40:49):
And so as a result, they've ceded some of their moral
authority to be able to respond to concerns that are raised
about the field and to try to engender trust in the process
among members of the public. So what I think the good news is
that it's slowly changing. Those institutions are slowly
(41:10):
kind of getting a feeling that they're in some trouble in that
way. So I'm going to tell you one
reason why I'm somewhat discouraged and one reason why
I'm somewhat hopeful. So I want to mention this is a
story I did in about a guy by the name of Eliza Mosley, who
was previously the of the neuroscience division of the
(41:33):
National Institute on Aging. So that is a job that is
responsible for funding more Alzheimer's Church than any
other entity in the world. So they give more grants in that
realm than anybody else, billions of dollars per year.
And so this is a very important guy because his thinking and his
(41:55):
reasoning and his leadership andjudgement had been for years at
the pinnacle of the grant makinginstitutions that we rely on for
the furtherance of thoughtful, incisive research that could
ultimately lead to treatments and cures for the disease.
And my reporting in conjunction with Matthew Schrag and three
(42:21):
other illustrious image sleuths,if you want to call them that,
Elizabeth Bick, Kevin Patrick and you, Liu Yang, a dossier was
developed on his work associatedwith his vast contributions to
neuroscience. This is a guy who had written
like 800 scientific papers, not all of them, but a fairly large
(42:44):
chunk of those were looked at bythat team led by the pioneering
work of Liu Yang at Columbia University.
And these sleuths found that 132of his papers had been
apparently based on image doctoring.
It's shocking really, because this guy at the pinnacle of
(43:05):
funding of the field was himselfimplicated in a, a just, you
know, really elaborate set of problems.
And when my story came out the day it came out, he had to be
forced out of his job. So the epilogue, in a sense of
this little anecdote is that I went to the National Institutes
(43:27):
of Health, which is the overall agency that sits above the
National Institute on Aging, which is was the agency that
Mosley was part of. And I asked them when he was
hired. Or when other senior people at
your agency are hired, do you just do a routine check for
possible image doctoring or other kinds of potential
(43:49):
scientific misconduct before hiring people for these high
posts? The answer was no, we didn't.
No, we don't, and we don't thinkit would be helpful.
And to me, this was a shocking kind of arrogant complacency in
the light of this scandal that they had just faced with one of
their top leaders. So to me, that is the
(44:10):
discouraging side of the story, that we still have a kind of a
sense of entitlement almost fromsome of the agencies that they
they just haven't taken matters into hand in an appropriate way.
The plus side is that I think journals and to some degree
universities are taking these issues more seriously.
(44:31):
Journals are starting to adopt software that can look at images
quickly and give them a hint as to whether there might be
problems that they need to address in a more determined
way. And so that's one good sign.
The other good sign is that people are looking over their
shoulders. The rise of this of image
(44:53):
sleuths, in my view, has been a positive sign in the scientific
community that that it's just important to Crowdsource some of
these things. The problems are too large.
The issues are too large. Now, that is not to say that
every finding by these people iscorrect.
And it's not to say that they sometimes don't engage in
(45:15):
accesses like personal attacks on scientists that I would think
are not at all warranted and often are counterproductive.
But I would say the vast majority of people who are part
of this community of image solutes are respectful and
deeply determined merely to expose fraud or misconduct and
research in a way that could correct the scientific record.
(45:37):
And to the degree that we can begin to correct the record, we
can really unwind from some of its terrible effects and move
the field forward much faster. By exposing incorrect
information, the field can, in asense, cleanse itself and move
forward more rapidly. And that's really what it's all
about, to help serve the people who are living with Alzheimer's,
(46:00):
their families and our own future much, much better.
So from your experience, what motivates these salutes and
these image individuals that youwere talking about, what what
motivates them to to do what they do and how are they really
making a difference? Well, I think, you know, it's a
diverse group like like any group of people.
(46:21):
But I would say that, you know, the image sleuths are people
who, you know, question authority, are not afraid or
intimidated by authority, who are also themselves technically
interested. A lot of them are not
scientists. They're just people who know how
to use software and know how to to look critically at images and
(46:41):
try to understand how they were constructed or how they were
tampered with. And, you know, I would say
they're mostly hobbyists, just people who have fun doing this
and want to make a contribution.And in a general way, you know,
like any group of people, like scientists, the vast majority of
them have good intentions, are thoughtful and would like to see
(47:04):
an improvement of the field. You know, there's some who
don't. There's some who are cavalier or
unfair and and perhaps antagonistic to some of the
targets of their examinations. But look, that's the way it is.
And with humanity, we're, we're a diverse group, OK?
So my next question, I, I, I don't want to bring politics
into it or any of that kind of stuff, but I, I think we are
(47:28):
kind of looking at a potential pendulum swing here in the next
administration. But with that being said, what
role can policy makers, healthcare professionals play in
ensuring a greater accountability and transparency?
Yeah, that that's a terrific question that I've been, you
(47:49):
know, fretting about myself. And the reason I've been
fretting is that I think we're, you know, there is both
potential and danger in the coming period.
And so we have to face facts. A lot of these institutions,
including the National Institutes of Health and the
FDA, have not done as good a jobas they they must do to root out
(48:12):
misconduct or fraud in studies that they examine the fund and
approve for drug development. And so step one is to fund and
encourage and equip the agenciesto do a much better job of that
and to insist upon it. And that is something, you know,
forceful new administrators at those agencies can and should
(48:35):
do. I think there's been complacency
and a a sense of arrogance that has to be corrected.
So that's something that I wouldwelcome.
What I would not welcome is an attitude of or restricting the
scientific judgement of many of the experts in these agencies
(48:56):
who have done, in my view, in most cases, an excellent job of
scouting out ideas, of providingrigorous review to important
drugs. These are not institutions you
want to mess with so much that they can't do their jobs
effectively. Look, I have written about the
FDA and the NIH critically many times.
I've done numerous investigations about their
(49:19):
failings and the failings of theCDC.
But I do it from a a perspectiveof the work that they do that we
all benefit from and insisting that they do better.
It's our obligation to do that. And look, if we if people who
are supportive of these agencies, don't criticize them
up from a perspective of support, you might say, don't
(49:42):
expose problems that they might not even be aware of themselves.
From a perspective of we want these institutions to do their
jobs better than people who basically want to use them or
misuse them for political purposes or destroy important
programs to meet the needs of some perceived or actual
constituency that they think they have, then those people
(50:06):
will have free reign. We have to find an approach that
strengthens the institutions andmakes them do better, not hacks
away at them in a way that will create really desperate needs
for better intervention. So shifting gears a bit, and we
ask this of all our guests, whatare you doing personally to age
(50:26):
well? OK, well, I've got two things
that I think are keeping me younger than I would otherwise
be. 1 is that I am fascinated bythe work that I do, and I feel
very privileged to have a platform where I can think
deeply, spend an enormous amountof time learning about new
(50:47):
things in science and stretchingmy brain to try to interpret it
for the public. That is a great gift that I've
been given through my hard work,of course, but also I know that
so many others in society would like to be making those kinds of
contributions and even though they're well qualified, they
haven't been able to. So I'm very happy and I feel
very privileged about that. The other thing is that keeps me
(51:10):
going in that way and keeps me young is spending an enormous
amount of time with my two year old granddaughter who is one of
the loves of my life and she's amazing and she also forces me
to stay in the moment. That's what 2 year olds do and
it's a great gift to me as well.Hey, Kurt.
So an important part of aging well is kind of living in the
(51:32):
moment. Indeed it is.
Not living in the past, not living too far in the future.
So is someone who is so deeply immersed in this investigation
what gives you hope for the future of Alzheimer's Research
and patient care? Well, a few things.
One is that I think notwithstanding the dominance of
(51:52):
the amyloid hypothesis, which issomething that I'm not
suggesting should be completely abandoned.
Obviously it's obvious that amyloid proteins have something
to do with Alzheimer's, but I'm encouraged that there's the
start of much more diversified research going on.
Some interest in things like possible the what's called the
infection hypothesis, that Alzheimer's might be related to
(52:15):
brain infections. Also the inflammation hypothesis
that different causes of inflammation might be
contributing to the development of Alzheimer's, dementia and
others. And in fact, there's some pretty
fascinating studies that are coming out soon. 1 related to
the GLP one inhibitor drugs. These are the weight loss drugs
that have been yielding what some people are calling kind of
(52:38):
seeming up miraculous, seeminglymiraculous benefits.
They're now being tested as possible remedies for dementia.
And so I guess what I'm saying is that never underestimate the
power of creative thinking of the scientific community that is
going to help us in the future. The second is never
underestimate the determination of image sleuths to root out
(53:03):
potentially bad behavior and to make sure that attention is
called to it, and slowly but surely force the scientific
community to do some self policing that is more effective.
Those are two things that give me a lot of hope for the future.
Even though a cure for Alzheimer's I think is still a
ways off, I think we should all at least hold out some hope for
(53:25):
ourselves that there is this isn't an endless problem.
That's good. And there's any upcoming
projects or areas of investigation you're excited to
share? Well, unfortunately I can't
share what I'm working on now. It's just sort of the the thing
about I can't pre disclose stuffthat's going to happen in the
future in my field. So it just means we got to watch
(53:47):
your work and watch for all the,you know, great projects coming
out, right? I'd be very grateful if you did.
You can find me on in the my webpage on Science magazine and
also, of course, my books comingout.
When you listen to this, it'll be out and I'll be, you know,
very eager to hear any feedback that readers might have.
(54:10):
And we'll have links to that andto your website and you do any
social media or anything else like that.
I do. I'm on I'm on Twitter and
starting to get going on Blue Sky.
All right. Well, is there anything we
missed today? I feel like we talked about so
much, but I want to make sure you have your voice fully spoken
today. No, I really appreciate the
(54:31):
opportunity, Jeff. I think your questions were the
the right ones to get to the heart of the matter and I'm very
appreciative to have the time taken to get a look at the work
that I'm doing. All right, well, when you have
so that more that I was going tosay more important work, but
it's not really more important work.
The additional important work that you have coming out in the
(54:52):
future is that comes out, you know, keep us in mind and you
know, we'd love to have you share it here with us because,
you know, we want people to get the right information to be able
to age well. And I think.
You're providing that information, so we thank you for
that. OK.
Thank you again for your interest.
Thank you for listening. I hope you benefited from
today's podcast and until next time, keep aging well.
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