Matthew Schrag

The other thing is that they've found over and over that the higher educational attainment that people have, it has a benefit that can reduce the severity or the age of onset for the disease.

This experiment gave new confidence to people in the field and became one of the most cited experiments in the history of the disease through 2022.

That, again, is the journalist Charles Piller.

So what happened next?

Schrag and I started to look carefully at this, and ultimately I wrote a story about it in Science Magazine.

Primarily in this case, it involves something called Western blot images.

Now, these are a very, very common technique used in science, particularly often in Alzheimer's research and in other fields as well.

And what they are, are a photographic representation of proteins.

So you can test a protein sample for the type of

an amount of different proteins within it.

This is very important in Alzheimer's research because you're trying to determine what proteins are in an animal brain, for example, that might be behind the disease in some way.

And so what Schrag found from his work, and this was validated by other forensic image experts, by me going to them, and also by leaders in the field of Alzheimer's research,

What was found was that these images apparently were manipulated in severe ways that tended to support the hypothesis of the experiment when the actual data did not support it.

That conversation is one that regrettably never occurred because he wouldn't speak to me.

I mean, Schrag's a scientist.

I was the one who, as a journalist writing the article, of course, I did everything I could possibly do to get Lesney and his co-investigator, who at the time of the experiment was his boss, Karen Ash, to speak to me.

Prior to the article appearing, they both refused to speak with me.

This is detailed in my book and also in the article that I wrote about it.

And it was, I think,

Not that surprising in a way.