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 so I think the institutions of science need to also be willing to say when mistakes were made, and even if they fear the reputational hit. You know, one really great example has to do with universities. So universities... are filled with every sort of human being.
And when certain doctors, even famous people within the university are found to have engaged in improper activity, misconduct of various kinds, sometimes what you see is universities investigate it, but in an endless way. in an endless secretive way where you don't really ever get to the bottom of it in a public way so that the public is left wondering.
This, I think, greatly diminishes trust in institutions. There should be a more public process. There should be a way of preserving the right of due process for people who are accused of wrongdoing, the right of due diligence on the part of the organization to look at things carefully.
but also balance that with the need to provide the public with a real explanation for why they should trust the institution. And that's why, in my opinion, some of the problems have to do with independence, the independence of examination of these problems.
So when you have a serious set of accusations, for example, in the doctoring of research, it's almost always kicked back to the university, who then secretly look into it for months, sometimes for years, The public never learns of what the result was.
That's a terrible way to go about it because you've placed the institution that has the most to lose and the least to gain from a robust, rapid public examination of an important issue that the society and their community has a right to know about. You put them in charge of it, and then what do you get? You get more generalized distrust. So when you have people, particularly nowadays, who are...
generally distrustful of public health officials, scientists, public institutions like research institutions and regulatory agencies, and decrying all of their flaws and mistakes, I think often what you have is a symptom of a lack of transparency. You know, when a guy like me has to be the one exposing
problems that could have been detected for years and years by responsible institutions, you know you have a problem right off the bat.
Yeah, I'm glad you said the word transparency because the whole time you were discussing that, that's what I'm craving for. And I think, honestly, if we go back to the pandemic, the issue that I think all the organizations, CDC, FDA, all of the messed up with was the lack of transparency and honesty when it came to what we know and what we don't know.
And at times over promising things in order to get better buy-in. And I feel like that ultimately ended up harming people because that distrust, maybe you got better by it initially, but long-term, if you hurt that trust, as most of us know through human relationships, whether it's a friend, loved one, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, losing trust is really hard to get back.
So while yes, you may have an initial better outcome long-term, you're creating a bigger problem. And I feel like these organizations that say, oh, well, I'd rather put out a more clear message rather than a garbled message. Like right now with the COVID boosters, as an example,
Dr. Paul Offit and I talked about this, where most countries across the globe say that the COVID booster is really solid for people who are at higher risk, those over the age of 65, perhaps immunocompromised states, et cetera. And the United States says, no, we're going to say it's good for everyone.
And the real reason why the people in charge say that is because they say, when you send a nuanced message, we feel like there's less uptake. And there's no real harm of people getting it that are lower risk. And while that could be true, you're not really telling the complete picture. And I feel like people have good BS meters.
And if they sense that they're being misled, almost like the opposite of what you described when you lean in and say, we did mess up. Here's what we did wrong. Here's what we're going to do better. This is the opposite of that. It's almost like you're being lied to directly to your face. How do you then build trust in that organization? Do you feel that? Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
Really, there has to be better honesty and transparency by institutions. And there's so much fear within those institutions if they show any weakness or admit any weakness that they'll be sued or they'll have other public relations problems.
Well, let me just say though, that I, even though I just wrote a book about really a big set of problems in Alzheimer's disease, I do feel hopeful in certain ways. And I wanted to describe a couple of those. We live in an incredibly exciting time in the sense that It's much easier now for problems to be caught because of the ability to crowdsource those problems.
So what you see is that when institutions like universities and journals and government agencies have dropped the ball on image falsification in Alzheimer's and in other fields, you've seen this sort of army of volunteer image sleuths and you've seen the rise of important whistleblowers to point out these problems and to force institutions to take notice.
This has been a very, very important and large development that I think ultimately is going to greatly benefit patients. It's certainly going to change the nature of research in Alzheimer's disease. It's already having that effect. And consequently, it's going to create openings for new thinking.
And there are people waiting in the wings to try to get support for new ideas and new approaches to studying these problems that will benefit from the sort of emergence of crowdsourcing and volunteers who are able to do things that institutions can't always do because of the constraints that they feel legally or in other ways.
Yeah. It is optimistic. And at the same time, I'm currently reading a book called The Death of Expertise. Have you heard of it? Yeah, I've heard of it. I haven't read it. That leads me to be a bit more pessimistic because they're described the phenomenon that I can relate to from the social media world that I exist in, where
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