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
And of course, with people, with Alzheimer's disease, these are usually samples from people who have died and have donated their body to science. But these images then may not necessarily show what you're trying to show to prove your hypothesis out. But by altering them, you can make the image look more in line with what you're thinking is.
Let me give you a sense of how I think it sometimes evolves in the thinking of a scientist. So a scientist might start out being completely straight up and honest and not interested in doing any sort of manipulation and be very, very deeply in...
Committed to the science.
So committed in such a state of kind of rapture about their own ideas that they really would love to prove them out. And who among us can really step completely away from that? People become absorbed in their thinking and, you know, want to be right. And especially with something for which so many people are hoping that they might be right about, say, a new drug or a new experiment.
And so what you might have is a stepwise process where, first of all, what these scientists might be thinking is, well, I'm just going to make this image look a little bit better. I'm going to make it look prettier, and it'll have more curb appeal for journal editors who...
Like everyone else are susceptible to looking at more perfect looking images, even in the scientific sense that maybe most lay people aren't going to know the difference between a better looking or worse looking slice of brain tissue imagery. But scientists know what they're looking for and what they're looking at.
So you could say that maybe that isn't misconduct, it's maybe frowned upon, but it's something that can prove to be acceptable in the scientific process. Or at least people get away with it so often, and it's kind of like a misdemeanor, you might say. Then they might think, well...
I know that my experiment is correct, and there's a little bit of evidence for it in the scientific images that were generated, but it's not really crystal clear. I'm just going to sharpen it up a little bit. And they think, well, I'm only enhancing slightly what I know to be true. So that might be the next step of thinking. And then finally, what sometimes happens is that people say, well,
I know that my experimental premise is correct. I know that my idea for this experiment is one that could bear fruit. But for some reason, I'm not getting quite the result I'm looking for.
I'm just going to change the image in this way and in that way to show as if it were a correct result because I want to be sure to get it accepted so that I can do further research in the field in this direction. And that is outright scientific misconduct. So I'm sure that this progression happens.
It probably happens often because many people start out in science with only the best of intentions, with only superior ethics, but then kind of fall off that path and begin to do things that I think most of us would agree is improper and misleading.
There's got to be a good name for that corruption cascade. What a... Oh, there's got to be a nickname for it. We need to get something we can trademark. Yeah, exactly. Because I could see how that stepwise pattern could occur, especially with all of these publisher peril models that are going on in the scientific mind, especially of a young researcher.
There's been some critics of the major governmental institutions, NIH, CDC, that they are not letting younger researchers do take stabs at getting grants. Do you feel that to be the case or that's not really happening?
Yeah, I mean, the competition in particular for, there's a kind of grant that the NIH gives called R01. And this is a multi, potentially multi-year grant, very coveted because historically it's been used to launch a lot of early career scientists in their career. They have a good idea. They have a good set of ideas that could be developed, but they need time. They need to get a little traction.
in their laboratory work. And these are so competitive, incredibly hard to get. And often now you're seeing scientists waiting until their 40s to get these R01 grants that can kind of set them on their path. I think it's partly that the competition is a good thing because sometimes the best ideas rise to the top.
Sometimes it's a terrible thing because a lot of great ideas get squeezed out of the system and conventional wisdom can ascend and dominate and become sort of impossible to get away from for certain people. Let me give you an example of how that, I think, has had a deleterious effect on Alzheimer's disease. So some listeners might be familiar with something called the amyloid hypothesis.
This is the dominant hypothesis within Alzheimer's disease. And to state it quite simply, it involves the idea that
deposits of these amyloid proteins, which are sometimes called the sticky plaques that accumulate in a person's brain, they also occur in other forms, forms that can dissolve in the fluid that surrounds your brain, that these amyloid proteins lead to a cascade of biochemical effects in your brain that ultimately result in dementia.
This idea has had such dominance, and since its ascendancy about 30 years ago, has literally crowded out a lot of other ideas because the funding has been so robust for the amyloid hypothesis that a lot of investigators feel that their best chance of success in the field, a field that they care deeply about and may have innovative ideas about, but they know they might have to view as closely as they can to that hypothesis in order to be funded because of
bias in the system associated with it. Now, I'm happy to report that it's not like all research in the field is strictly about that. There are new ideas coming to the fore that I think are innovative and interesting and are beginning to get funding. And of course, there's always people who are interested in exploring prevention associated with neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's, that
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