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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that merits a lot of attention and can have some success. So all of these things are happening simultaneously. But when you have one idea that has so deeply captured a lot of the scientific thinking in the field, it can crowd out things. I like to think of it a little bit as, you know, if you want to use an analogy to why do farmers rotate crops?
Because if you have a monoculture, one crop in the same field for year after year after year after year, It can exhaust the soil of nutrients that it needs. And so they rotate crops. I think there needs to be some rotation of ideas within Alzheimer's more than we see today in order to come to the full potential of innovation.
And within this research that you've investigated so thoroughly, has there been evidence that was supporting the amyloid model that has been disproven or has it largely stayed out of that discussion?
Well, the genesis of my interest in this had to do with a famous experiment, one of the most influential experiments in Alzheimer's disease, basic science experiments. And this was done by scientists primarily at the University of Minnesota. And what this experiment did is that they extracted a certain type of
amyloid protein from genetically engineered mice that were designed to produce a lot of amyloid protein in their brains. They extracted this protein, a certain specific type of amyloid protein that they called amyloid beta star 56. They even came up with that kind of clever name for it, AB star 56, that was very memorable.
And then they injected it into rats and the rats then showed signs of memory loss that could be compared to certain symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. So what was really interesting about this experiment was that it was a sort of proof of concept that amyloid proteins had a direct relationship to causing something like Alzheimer's, at least in rats. And so,
So, the initial article I did in this realm involved an assessment of that experiment and related work and what was found by a particular scientist with whom I worked very closely and who produced a dossier, you might call it,
on a lot of the experiments in this group was that this experiment was based on thoroughly doctored images, images that had been changed in ways so as to support the experimental premise and results. And so what you have here is a fundamental experiment in Alzheimer's disease that had a lot of influence in pushing the field forward and validating the amyloid hypothesis and encouraging people
to look at new elements and permutations of that hypothesis in a way that had tremendous, tremendous force in the field. What we found was that it was based on false data, on data that was proved to be false. And two years after my story in science came out describing this, the paper was finally retracted by most of its authors.
And it was appearing in the journal Nature, which is a very important, famous journal. So this was a kind of a landmark moment in a way. So to answer your question more broadly, in my book, Doctored, I... looked at several dozen important scientists in Alzheimer's research and, of course, their collaborators and their trainees.
So all in all, representing the work of hundreds of scientists in the field, including some very important scientists. And so thousands of images in these many hundreds of papers that were examined were found to have been based on improperly changed or doctored image manipulation. What percentage of those were related to the amyloid hypothesis? The vast majority. And the reason is pretty clear.
When the dominance of an idea is so extreme in an industry that most of the research is associated with, in one way or another, with the amyloid hypothesis, it's logical to understand that this would be found not just in good science, in strongly developed and reliable science, but also in doctor science or just plain poorly done experiments. And part of the reason for it is that
It's easier to get away with improperly changed, manipulated images in Alzheimer's disease if you're going for a set of ideas that is already well accepted in the field. There's less scrutiny. There are people who say, well, of course this is illogical.
finding in this experiment because we know from this experiment and that experiment and these 50 other experiments that have done associated with the amyloid hypothesis that of course we're going to find something like this. And so people cut corners and they think, I'm never going to get caught on this.
And maybe I even believe in it deeply and I'm willing to roll the dice on possibly getting caught. But there you have it. Yes.
These big journals, Nature, Lancet, there have been issues with journal articles being published that ended up being retracted. There's supposed to be a peer review process that is very thorough. And part of that peer review process seems to leave out the fact-checking of corruption, of fraud.
Do we need to change the peer review process to make those people participating in peer review to be more cognizant or to be on the lookout for these type of situations?
Yeah, I want to tell you a small anecdote from... One person who I looked into the work of, a very famous Alzheimer's and stroke scientist at the University of Southern California by the name of Berezlov Zolakovich. And
When I looked at dozens of his papers and people who were helping me with this and working on examining the images found a lot of problems with these papers, a lot of apparently doctored images, part of my due diligence process, part of my own process of checking the images
believability of concerns raised about these images is to go to subject matter experts in the field, people who know this stuff cold and would be able to both understand the possibility of manipulation, but also its meaningfulness, whether it's important or not, what it does to change ideas in the paper and in the field itself.
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