Charles Piller

The researchers extracted that protein from the mice and injected it into the brains of rats, who soon after showed signs of cognitive decline.

The major issue they found with the paper by Lesnay and Ash had to do with the images that were used as evidence.

So I assume that you contact Lesnay.

What's that conversation like?

Okay.

And what about Matthew Schrag, your co-investigator?

Did Lesnay or anyone else from his lab, including, I guess, Karen Ash, did they speak with Schrag or respond to any comments?

Is he sending them information about his charges of manipulation?

The thing that frustrates me about that is universities are also part of the public trust and they get a lot of research funding from taxes.

And so I feel like it should be incumbent upon them to at least respond, at least take the charges seriously.

When you found that you weren't getting a serious response from her, what was your next step then?

What was the extent of that university investigation?

It was co-author Karen Ash who formally requested that the paper be retracted from the journal Nature.

In a note she published elsewhere, Ash acknowledged problems with the data, but said she had had no knowledge of it until it was brought to her attention.

We reached out to both Karen Ash and Sylvain Lesnay.

Lesnay declined to speak with us, and we didn't hear back from Ash.

And what about Cassava Sciences and their experimental Alzheimer's drug, Simufilum?

Charles Piller and Matthew Schrag kept digging into that as well.

Piller published an article in Science about an internal report from the City University of New York, which found numerous signs of image manipulation in Haoyan Wang's work and bad data management.

In 2024, the Department of Justice indicted Wang for allegedly fabricating and falsifying data in NIH grant applications related to simufilum.