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
So this combination of plaques, tangles, and dementia was defined and described as Alzheimer's disease. And so what happened for many decades after that was honestly not that much. And the reason it was not that much was that this disease is a disease of old people, basically. primarily old people. Very, very few people get it in their younger years.
And consequently, because of simple demographics, for many decades after 1906, there weren't really that many people living into their 70s, 80s, 90s, and beginning to show the symptoms of dementia associated with Alzheimer's disease. So while it was a well-known syndrome, it was not an important disease.
But come the 50s, 60s, 70s, when gigantically important developments in medicine like vaccines, antibiotics, remedies for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, all of these things suddenly became prevalent in our medical practice and people began to understand better how to treat them and lifespans increased dramatically. Consequently, we had a lot more old people and those old people
unfortunately, many of them began to get dementia, dementia described as Alzheimer's disease. So suddenly Alzheimer's disease became a very important, very important kind of disease to study. And a lot of money went into it. A lot of ideas came out.
And the prevalent idea, the idea that gained the most power in the field, that had the most currency among scientists and physicians and funders and journals, everybody, was something called the amyloid hypothesis. And as I said before, what this involves is...
The deposits of amyloid protein that build up in the brain cause a cascade of biochemical effects in the brain that eventually lead to dementia, cell death, and the terrible symptoms of the disease. This was really very widely accepted. And so what happened was they built a lot of new drugs around this idea, drugs that attack the amyloid plaques and try to remove them from the brain.
And scientists and drug developers and pharma companies can be very clever. They were really good at doing this, really good at finding these compounds and these various biological drugs that could remove the amyloid plaques from the brain very effectively. The problem was they did not arrest or improve the dementia symptoms of the disease. So no one was getting better.
And these drugs, many of them had terrible side effects that could be extremely dangerous, sometimes lethal. And so because of this terrible combination of, you know, the effectiveness of removing the amyloids, but the ineffectiveness of benefiting patients, there was a lot of discouragement about the amyloid hypothesis. People began to say, is this really the right path we're walking down?
Or should we be pursuing other scientific avenues that might be more fruitful, more effective? And what happened was right about this time, 2006, after a bunch of these failures in drug development, came this experiment out of the University of Minnesota that appeared in Nature magazine.
And lo and behold, it instilled new hope, new understanding, and new confidence in the proponents of the amyloid hypothesis that, yes, we're on the right track. We haven't found the right substance yet that is going to be the cure or the substance that really hits its mark and starts to really arrest the symptoms of the disease.
But we are going to get there because we know this experiment has in a way led the way. Now, it wasn't the only experiment like that. There were others as well, but this one was pivotal because it came at a critical time and it resulted in a gigantic, gigantic influence. gigantic influx of funding and interest in the field.
So that's where we were that moment with Matthew Schrag, him thinking about the experiment, and him seeing this might have been based on doctored images that really caught my attention.
We both, in a way, were kind of stunned because we realized, if true, if his concerns were well-founded, then it might call into question a very important experiment that could cast doubt on this ongoing research associated with the amyloid hypothesis.
Well, I think increasingly it has been talked about. I think one of the pieces of evidence that is I mentioned earlier, again, I have very mixed feelings about this, is RFK Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya both brought it up in their comments to Congress during their confirmation hearings. But I guess I would put it this way.
When I originally wrote an article about this finding in Science Magazine in 2022, there was a lot of uproar in the scientific community about it, a lot of concern about it. And there was a fair amount of coverage in the regular media, but not to the extent where it was like became household conversation, obviously. But it raised a lot of ruckus in the scientific community, for sure.
And so what's different now is that I've gone back and I've done years of research on Alzheimer's disease, on the amyloid hypothesis, and on the science behind all these things.
and have found that the field more generally has been stricken by a large amount of unfortunately apparently doctored research based on misconduct, where images that are central to the scientific findings in important experiments
and in other kinds of experiments that maybe aren't so important, but in a lot of important experiments, had been changed improperly to reflect the experimental hypothesis of the person doing the work. And when you're changing your data, to try to make it look better, you know that you're not proceeding in an honest way.
And so, yes, there has been a lot of interest in the book, a lot of attention paid to it, because it is so important to the millions of Alzheimer's patients in our country. And the many more millions of their loved ones and caregivers, to have the most honest, effective ways of looking at the disease.
And if there are problems in the way the thinking has gone, if there are cracks in the edifice, if you were, of the institutional authorities of Alzheimer's disease and the most powerful forces, then We need for people to understand that better and understand the importance of it and the meaningfulness of it.
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