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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Passion Struck with John R. Miles · Alzheimer’s Research, Doctored Data, and the Human Cost | Charles Piller – EP 722 · 29 Jan 2026 podcast

So consequently, what happened after this historic experiment by, as you say, Karen Ash and Sylvain Lesnay at the University of Minnesota, it reinvigorated thinking in the field.

It reinforced the amyloid hypothesis.

It regenerated the funding for this and the many new experiments for it.

But what Matthew Schrag did, and finally I'm back to the beginning of your question, Matthew detected the problems in this study in the form of doctored scientific images that called into question the entire premise of the experiment.

If you have image after image within a seminal scientific study that are shown to be based on false science, on changes in these images to reflect the experimental hypothesis.

In other words, when the actual data did not prove the hypothesis, the images were changed

in a way that would suggest to reviewers and suggest to scientists that this hypothesis was true.

This is a form of apparent scientific misconduct that had an enormous effect on the field, an enormous effect on funding and scientific research and drug development.

Now, it was not solely responsible for that, but it was important at the time.

It was one of the most cited scientific studies in the field in decades.

And this is what Matthew Schrag detected.

This is what he found and brought the evidence to me so that he felt strongly that it had to be exposed into the world more generally so the scientific community could take stock and try to correct the thinking in the field that might have improperly skewed thinking in the direction of ideas that were not well founded.

So now I'm going to get to exactly your question, the risks that he took.

So you're talking about a junior professor at Vanderbilt University did not have tenure going up against some of the biggest journals

funders and authorities, all people and institutions he needed to continue and develop his career, to become successful as a scientist himself.

And yet he ultimately decided that his journey of discovery was central to helping the public understand this set of contradictions.

And that he was trusting me after literally months of discussion about this, that he trusted me to tell his journey of discovery in both Science Magazine and in the pages of my book in such a way that we could try to illuminate the importance of it and to help to try to correct the scientific record in a positive way that could open up new ideas for the field.

Well, yes and no.

So what Schrag did is that he always followed the path of the appropriate way to question research, which is to go to the funding agencies and the journals, the agencies that funded the work and the journals that published it, and to present all of his information openly to them and make sure that they had the full set of concerns about a body of work

in order to judge whether it's worth looking at and whether his concerns might be well founded.

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