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
Like I say, on the ground floor on that one.
Well, I would say that my most recent book that was just published doctored. To me, that was the most difficult and challenging. And the reason is that, you know, I... Forgive me, listeners. I flatter myself by saying I think I'm a better writer now than I was a long time ago when I worked on my earlier books. I hope that we all can improve in our craft over time.
One of the things that I set a goal for myself with this book was to tell it as a narrative story. with a clear story arc. And what I mean by that is that this is not a dry recitation of scientific concerns or findings from an investigation. What this book is about is telling a story. How were these problems in the world of Alzheimer's disease discovered?
And the book describes a lot of apparently falsified research, doctored research in critical areas. And For me, the challenge was not just learning what those were, which was a big challenge in and of itself, and I'm happy to talk about how I went about doing that, but also critical was to find the right people to use as tools
the storytellers, really, to use their life experiences as a way of understanding the implications of this raft of apparently doctored research on the field and on the challenges and difficulties in finding effective remedies for this disease that's so critical for the United States and the world and also afflicts so many people and has such a massively difficult effect on their family members and caregivers.
Well, I mean, I guess it depends in part on whether you're talking about reporters or the general public. But I can speak as a reporter. I was too young to be a reporter during the Nixon era, where he had created an enemies list that included many reporters. And he was someone who believed quite adamantly in that the press was something to be reined in.
Now, look, all presidential regimes, all administrations have had challenging relationships with the media at times. And the current one is no exception in that regard. I think this media environment's very, very different from the one that I grew up in, if you will, as a reporter. And the differences are, of course, exemplified by Thank you so much.
It means that the conventional mainstream media has much less control over the way in which people think about the world. And that, you know, there are both pros and cons associated with that. Now, for me, look, I have worked throughout my entire career in what you might call call the mainstream media.
And I respect the work ethic and the ethical posture and the professional approach of serious-minded reporting, not to the exclusion of other people doing other things. But to me, that's pretty important for delivering the kind of reporting that I do. I need to have that professional backstop. I need to have the determination to
double-check, triple-check every fact in every story in my entire book. I spent months fact-checking my book after it was written. That's just part of the process that you have to do if you want to deliver a product that is the maximum degree of credibility, especially if you're challenging people in important ways. Now,
With regard to today's approach, I appreciate the question in part because I wanted to mention issues that I see related to the Trump administration right now. So let me take it on two levels. One is that there have been a lot of accusations by President Trump and others who are his supporters that there's a lot of what they call fake news in the mainstream media.
I personally think that that's ill-advised and misguided. I think it's improper for those kinds of accusations to be made as a general course of affairs. I think that the mainstream media, and by that I mean some of the big newspapers and many of the big TV broadcasts, et cetera, work really hard on their credibility. No one's perfect. No one is without error. Every one of us is subject to that.
But there's a high degree of professionalism there. I think suggesting that it's false just because it may have an opinion that President Trump may disagree with, I think that's tremendously misguided. Now, I want to address, if I may, Dylan, just briefly. kind of funny situation that I found myself in as a reporter in the last few weeks since my book has come out.
So my book talks about challenging the poor performance, what I would call the poor performance, of many of the institutional authorities of science in our country. And when I say the institutional authorities of science, I mean the
The journals, like including the one I work for, Science, the universities who are gatekeepers of important knowledge in the world, the National Institutes of Health, which is the primary funder of biomedical and medical research in the country, and so very, very important for ensuring the quality of that work and that thinking.
and the Food and Drug Administration, which is the entity that approves and sometimes disapproves new drugs for remedies or other kinds of remedies that people really are desiring for important diseases. So I think all four of those institutions, the journals, the universities, the funder, and the regulator have really made a lot of mistakes and have had grave weaknesses in their behavior
That has led to a lot of the problems of misconduct associated with the work that I've done for my book that relates to Alzheimer's disease and the deleterious effects on scientific thinking and on the development of remedies in that field.
because my book is so critical of them, and because there are real problems in the field of Alzheimer's disease, I think that it can be possible to mistake that kind of criticism for a general condemnation of those organizations. I believe that the journals, the universities,
the funder, NIH, and the regulator, FDA, we are extremely fortunate in our country to have these entities who are so incredibly effective in so many ways, delivering new knowledge, helping certify the benefits of certain drugs and keeping others that may be suspect out of the approval process. Those are things that we should honor and appreciate. It doesn't mean they're perfect.
It doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect them to up their game when they are doing things that are not beneficial, that are complacent, that allow improper behavior. or inadequate research to somehow gain ascendancy in a field in a way that is based at times even to some degree on fraud or misconduct. So I've been very critical of them. But there have been a couple of occasions where RFK Jr.
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