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 I'll never forget this moment where I went to this particular expert who was a world-class expert in the science behind some of these papers, showed him the dossier, and he came back to me and he said, he was sort of, astonished himself because he found in the dossier of apparently doctored papers, a paper that he had personally peer reviewed and approved for publication. He had no idea.
And, but in seeing it in the dossier where the, the image is taken apart and it's analyzed step-by-step what might've happened, uh, He said, of course, I should have seen this. But we're not asked to do that. We're not trained to do it. What we're trained to do is look at the science and see if it makes sense. We're not trained to look for possible fraud. We trust our colleagues.
We trust their scientific expertise and their veracity as scientists. And so I would say, in answer to your question, should peer review change? The short answer is yes. People should all be somewhat on the lookout for this. It shouldn't be this obscure thing that people don't even think about when they're reviewing papers.
But I think the primary responsibility should lie with the journals themselves. They need to put in place sophisticated and methodological procedures for checking papers the same way they review papers to see if they are scientifically important enough to publish. They need to make sure that they're scientifically honest enough to publish.
Fortunately, there's software tools that make a big difference in helping check for that nowadays. And so both using those tools and then having a human being review the results is a critical first step. Now, this can cost money.
Journals don't want to spend the money, but look, if they're going to represent science properly, if they're going to prevent us being steered off into wrong directions and dead ends, it's essential that they start to get serious about this process.
Yeah, they put so much emphasis on impact factor. Maybe we should put a bigger emphasis on fraud factor. There we go. You mentioned that specifically within Alzheimer's research, there's been the issue with this fraud because of the initial basis for the amyloid hypothesis.
Does that mean everything we know or at least thought we knew about Alzheimer's is actually fraught with major error and we need to go back to the drawing board? Because my initial education on the Alzheimer's disease model is amyloid hypothesis, tau protein, other conditions, vascular dementia being looped into it.
Does that mean we actually have no idea where we are with Alzheimer's or is there some truth still in these original hypotheses?
I think that many scientists would say that Alzheimer's is a multifactorial disease. So there could be a lot of reasons why dementia occurs. I think even the critics of the amyloid hypothesis, many of them would say amyloid proteins, tau proteins, as you mentioned, which is another protein that occurs inside the neurons in the brain, that they're connected with the disease.
And these, of course, are the signature markings that the so-called discoverer of Alzheimer's disease, Al Wah, Alzheimer's, from Germany back more than 100 years ago, these were things that he noticed. And so I think it's clear that there's something going on there. What I think is less well understood is the relationship of that to other factors.
And I think many scientists are now saying we need to look at possible infections. We need to look at inflammation in the brain that might be caused by a variety of sources. And we need to look at new thinking about repurposing certain drugs that might have proved effective for other disorders that might be more rapidly developed into something that could possibly be useful in Alzheimer's disease.
So there's a lot of ideas out there. But I would not say throw out all the things we've learned.
I have to say that it's been troubling to me that sometimes articles that I've written have been seized upon by people who I do not think are interested in developing our scientific institutions in a way that they are more effective, but are more interested in tearing them down, perhaps for political reasons.
who have said oh well because this research was false or misguided or falsified that means that all alzheimer's research and maybe even by extension all scientific research is completely untrustworthy i don't believe that for a second what i believe is that institutions need to be improved they've fallen down on the job in certain ways they've been complacent in certain ways
They've given in to their own weaknesses in certain ways, but we rely on them, and it's up to us. Push them. Push them hard to do better for all of our benefit.
What's your take on the new... political party coming in, in 2025, new NIH director, new HHS director. I mean, no one's confirmed yet, but as it stands, the nominations are put forth. Are you optimistic, pessimistic, or neutral in general for the future of healthcare as a whole?
Yeah, I would say that I'm pessimistic. I think some of the... Look, this is not an area that I've analyzed with great care, so I'm going to speak only briefly about this. But I am skeptical about a lot of the ideas that are being put forth by some of the people who have been nominated for those positions. You know, I think it would be a mistake to think that every idea they have is ridiculous.
I don't take that position. Let's just talk for a second about RFK Jr. Look, I strongly disagree with almost everything he says about vaccines. And I think vaccines are one of the most important scientific developments of the last hundred years and have been instrumental in improving health outcomes globally.
So I think it would be a terrible shame if ideas about, in my opinion, misguided ideas about the possible harm that vaccines might cause became the ascendant idea within our important health institutions.
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