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
His studies had been cited by leading people in the field thousands and thousands of times, even though they were filled with images that appeared to have been based on doctoring. Doctoring in ways that often fundamentally changed the results so that you could no longer rely on the experiment, no longer rely on its conclusions.
So when I asked the National Institutes of Health, which is the parent agency for NIA, when I asked them, did you, when he was hired, do any sort of check for possible falsification of data in his work? The answer was, no, we didn't. And we don't think that's very useful or helpful to our agency.
So to me, it was a stunning display of complacency, a stunning display of an attitude that is very much out of step with the realities of our current situation, where the technological means to alter images in a way that's very hard to detect has been increasing day by day. And I think it's going to get worse with AI.
So we need to build up the infrastructure of people that are conscientiously thinking about these issues in advance, carefully, and with the idea in mind that while most scientists are honest and would never do this, there's enough of it out there to alter the field, and we need to take a close look.
I find it so strange that these organizations that put so much emphasis on making sure that they rule out conflicts of interest, that they disclose conflicts of interest, anything that could potentially influence an article's predisposition or ruling thereafter. are so nonchalant about potential fraud that can occur within the same ecosystem.
Is that because they're more worried about the fraud coming out and them being implicated in it? Or is it they have blind trust in the people that they work with?
Well, I think it's a combination of factors. First of all, the regulators and the funders, they identify with the scientists who ask for their money and who are asking them to review and approve drugs. They identify with the companies and with the individual scientists at universities. These are their peers. These are their colleagues.
And so they want to assume the best and also want to give them the benefit of the doubt. That's one thing. Second, I think they are technologically behind the times. They are living a little bit in the past. They haven't realized that the degree to which these problems have increased with the ease with which scientific images can be altered in a relatively seamless way.
And it's pretty interesting, um, I think one of the things that to me is the most interesting about this entire state of affairs is that like so many things on the internet, what has happened is that because when institutions don't effectively do their job, there becomes a community of people. who are self-organized and they start to do the job for the institutions. The sleuthing of the world.
That's right. The, the image sleuths, they like to call themselves often. And these are folks that in their own spare time, because almost no one's making a living doing this. They're just fascinated by the discovery process. Like, you know, a little bit like true crime detectives and they, what they want to do is look at these images and,
Interestingly, even without understanding the underlying science often, you can just become an expert in understanding whether images might have been altered and using software tools to assist that process. And so in a way, the image sleuths publishing on things like a website called PubPeer, which frames itself as a discussion club for articles, scholarly articles,
And in fact, what often happens is that it becomes a place where people with concerns about possibly altered images or phony research can post those. And they usually are posted as questions. We're not sure what's going on here, but this doesn't look right to us. Can the authors please respond to this? And I think you'll find that about 90% of the time there's no author response.
because they usually don't have a good story to tell because these image sleuths are, many of them are quite good at what they do. And they're taking the place of institutional authorities like journals, funders, and regulators who are not doing as good a job at watchdogging these issues.
Do you think that there's a rise in this type of corruption in the scientific world because of the finances involved and how there's been an astronomical rise in the potential money to be made on medications, on discoveries, on breakthroughs? Is that the incentive there?
I do think it is in cases. Just to be clear again, I think the use of image manipulation to move forward drugs in development, it definitely occurs, but it's not common. There are lots of problems in drug development, as I'm sure many of the people of you are listening to this, really know from their own experience or from observing the news. But in this case, it can be used in that way.
So let me give you an example. So something I write about a lot in the book is a And they developed an Alzheimer's drug called Simufilam. So it's a funny, generic-sounding name. This drug was meant to be a cure for Alzheimer's, or at least a drug that could show dramatic improvement in cognitive symptoms, which would be an amazing breakthrough.
So, for the last several years, there have been a series of developments showing that, number one, the basic science studies—these are the studies that are before you get a drug into development. You have these, as you know, basic science studies— that test things in the lab to see if the drug might be relatively safe and relatively effective in people.
And then you go through a series of other studies like these so-called phase one studies where it's just testing for safety. You don't want to give someone a drug that might be very harmful. So you test it in a small number of healthy people to pass that bar. And then you go into phase two and phase three trials, which tested in much larger numbers of people for both safety and for effectiveness.
So this is a company where literally for years it's been shown over and over again that the basic science experiments associated with their drug were apparently based on doctored images. And this was known by the funders, by the FDA, and by the general public because it was written about in the press by myself and many others.
Then, more recently, it was learned that even the clinical experimental data was cherry-picked and changed in its presentation by people within Cassava Sciences. And to make it look like the drawbook was being more effective than it really was in its Phase II studies, this proved to be instrumental in getting the FDA to permit it to go into Phase III studies.
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