Charles Piller
speaker
984 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 17 Apr
Charles Piller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Schrag, at the time I met him, was an untenured junior professor at Vanderbilt University.
He's a neuroscientist, so he does laboratory research about the brain and about how it functions.
And he's also a neurologist.
So he treats patients who have symptoms of dementia.
He has this broad perspective on Alzheimer's disease that I think is critical to his bigger understanding of the field.
And Matthew, so he's a whistleblower.
what he did is he uncovered certain seminal experiments in the field of Alzheimer's research.
These are basic science experiments, laboratory experiments that steered a lot of thinking in the field.
And they steered the thinking towards the acceptance of something called the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease.
So
Perhaps it would be best before I answer your question directly about a Matthew Schrag is to take a step back and explain what is the MLA hypothesis and why does it matter?
So maybe if you'll forgive me, I'm going to digress.
Okay.
I'm going to step back very briefly, more than 100 years, to the guy who discovered, if you want to put it that way, Alzheimer's disease, the namesake, Alois Alzheimer, a German scientist.
And he, in doing an autopsy of a very...
terribly demented patient of his who died.
He examined her brain and found these structures, amyloid protein plaques that you were mentioning, and also another kind of protein called tau that takes the form of these kind of tangled shapes within nerve cells.
And so you have these two proteins, amyloid tau and dementia that became the definition of a disease called Alzheimer's disease.
Now, for many years, Alzheimer's disease was a relatively minor thing in the scientific world.
And the reason is purely a demographic one.
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