Charles Piller

And now it's in the FDA's hands.

Maybe you're thinking that, of course, the FDA will follow your prescription because you had a lot of confidence in your data.

Right.

But I don't know.

Did you have any skepticism that the FDA would wind it down?

I see.

This is Haoyan Wang at City University of New York.

Is that right?

And what did you hear back from the NIH?

One of the whistleblowers in the Cassava Sciences case reached out to a reporter at the prestigious journal Science, who connected Matthew Schrag with a colleague of theirs, the investigative journalist Charles Piller.

Coming up after the break, we will hear how the problem expands.

I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.

Before the break, the Vanderbilt neuroscientist Matthew Schrag described what he considered doctored research coming out of the biotech firm Cassava Sciences.

The investigative journalist Charles Piller heard about Schrag's work and suggested that they collaborate.

Here's Matthew Schrag.

to see how this technique would perform.

One of these papers was a hugely influential study that had been published in the journal Nature in 2006.

It was called A Specific Beta Amyloid Protein Assembly in the Brain Impairs Memory.

Among the co-authors were two University of Minnesota researchers, Sylvain Lesnay and Karen Asch.

The research used genetically engineered mice whose brains produced excess amounts of amyloid protein.