Charles Piller

And even though I think Alzheimer's disease has been badly damaged by fraud and misconduct, I'd say that most scientists are not in that category.

Of course they're not.

If you look at the scientific record, there's been a lot of fraud and misconduct in heart disease, cancer research, diabetes research, basically everything, because a very small percentage of people in every field of life are going to cut corners or even worse.

But the difference is that unlike heart disease and cancer and diabetes and other very important human ailments,

which have seen enormous progress in the last few decades, which have seen even cures in some cases.

We have not seen that in Alzheimer's disease.

There's never been a remedy developed that arrests or reverses the cognitive symptoms that are so terrifying and so damaging.

And

really have created the sort of dementia crisis that we have worldwide with Alzheimer's.

And in my view, part of the reason why progress has been slow is that the human brain is an incredibly complex organ and is very difficult to decipher what's going on inside there.

So that's one reason.

Another reason is that when so much seminal research in the field is based on

Thinking that has been skewed by doctored images by falsification of data and by basically fraud that undoubtedly that has been a factor in the problem of a lack of progress in alzheimer's research so it's multiple problems.

Sure.

So I refer in the book to something that I call the amyloid mafia.

And I want to make it clear that it's not a real organization.

It's not a real mafia.

These are not criminals, except to the extent that some people who are proponents of issues in Alzheimer's, like some proponents of the amyloid hypothesis and other related scientific factors, have engaged in

inappropriate actions have engaged in doctored research.

But what I mean by the amyloid mafia is people whose careers and personal fortunes and paydays from pharma companies and scientific reputations and their legacies as scientists are all integral to this idea of this one dominant way of thinking in the field.