Charles Piller

Wong faced multiple charges, including major fraud against the United States, wire fraud and false statements.

A few months later, Cassava Sciences agreed to pay $40 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges that it misled investors on the effectiveness of Simufilum.

Cassava stopped development of the drug after publicly stating that it had failed in human clinical trials, showing no cognitive advantage over a placebo.

Cassava president and CEO Remy Barbier and senior vice president and neuroscientist Lindsay Burns both resigned.

And last month, Cassava Sciences announced that it was once again changing its name, this time to Falana Therapeutics.

Haoyan Wang also agreed to pay a fine related to the SEC charges.

And in 2025, all charges of fraud made by the DOJ were dropped.

We tried to reach Wang and got no response directly, but his lawyers said they are pleased that the case against Wang was dropped in light of new evidence and maintain that Wang is innocent of the accusations made against him.

We also reached out to Falana for comment.

A spokesperson for the company said they are currently focused on researching and developing a treatment for a rare form of epilepsy.

Meanwhile, Charles Piller, as part of his book research, had been looking into the track record of many Alzheimer's researchers.

And at that time, were there any suspicions of research misbehavior or image doctoring?

Work that he's directing personally?

So you compiled this dossier that identifies 132 papers with signs of apparent image doctoring.

How do you present this information to him and what's his response?

Eliezer Maslia declined to speak with us.

And the NIH sent us a statement to say that they do not comment on personnel matters.

Coming up after the break, Matthew Schrag has a reckoning with his former mentor.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

This is Freakonomics Radio.