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
And the scientists extracted one very specific type of amyloid protein called amyloid beta star 56, their star protein, if you will.
And they extracted this from the brains of mice.
They purified that one type of amyloid protein, injected it into rats, and then witnessed the symptoms of memory loss that they compared to memory loss and confusion
that people who have Alzheimer's disease have.
So what we had here was the first ostensible cause and effect relationship between a particular substance and Alzheimer's disease.
And people thought, oh, this is a revelation because it shows we are on the right track.
We may not have had the right specific amyloid target in our research, but we know we're on the right track.
We know that we're headed in the direction.
of curing Alzheimer's ultimately, or at least coming up with a treatment that can help the sufferers of Alzheimer's disease.
Yes, I think that is a good way to think about it, John.
And essentially, to cut to Manthe Shrag, so this went on, then there's a reinvigoration of the belief that the amyloid hypothesis was the correct way of looking at things.
And
an invigoration that meant many more billions of dollars being spent on possible remedies.
And then we had again failure after failure of these experimental drugs and then the science behind them to deliver on their promise.
And we also at the time, the science is a bit complicated.
I'm going to explain very briefly.
One of the contradictions is that people who have Alzheimer's, when they die and autopsies are done, they're often found they have enormous amounts of amyloid protein in their brain and also tau proteins.
And yet
It's also been shown that people who die who had no symptoms of Alzheimer's disease also have the presence of these proteins in their brains.
So it's one of the complexities of Alzheimer's disease that there's never been a fully understandable and good explanation for.
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