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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Back in the early 1900s, not that many people were living to the old age where Alzheimer's disease would become a serious problem.
And as medical science advanced in the 40s, 50s, 60s, suddenly we had vaccines, we had antibiotics, we had medical advances in cancer and heart disease, and the demographics shifted radically.
Many more people were living to old age and many more people were having the symptoms of dementia attributed to Alzheimer's disease.
And so consequently, a gigantic infusion of funds went into this in the 70s and 80s and 90s, and many hundreds of scientists started studying this.
And because of the definition, as it first was stated by Dr. Alzheimer,
it was strongly felt that the linchpin to this disease was amyloid plaques.
And so I can state the amyloid hypothesis very simply.
It's that the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain, which
nearly everyone has, leads to a series of biochemical events that gradually kills nerve cells, kills the neurons that make up the brain and causes the symptoms of dementia.
And it was felt very strongly that by removing these amyloid plaques from the brain, that you would have the ability to arrest and possibly even reverse the cognitive decline of Alzheimer's disease.
And so within that period of time, after billions of dollars are spent on research and billions of dollars are spent on the development of drugs that were then tested in people, there was a sort of very disappointing series of events, drug after drug that were capable of removing these plaques from the brain,
were found to not be effective in arresting or improving the cognitive symptoms of the disease.
In fact, many of them also had very dangerous side effects, including brain swelling and bleeding that in few cases could even cause death.
You had these ineffective drugs that were also dangerous to use.
And so some contradictions came into play in the scientific community, some doubts about whether they were on the right track came into play.
And so I'm getting closer to answering your question directly about Matthew Schrag.
So forgive me for this long digression, but I think it's important to get a little bit of the scientific background to understand where the field stood.
And so what happened was during this period of doubt, during this period of soul searching on the part of the scientific community, a brilliant experiment took place.
And this was at the University of Minnesota.
And in this experiment, scientists there were able to produce genetically engineered mice that produced copious amounts of amyloid plaques and other amyloid proteins within their brains.
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