The Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer's Science
17 comments
·February 2, 2025nextos
echelon
Instead of amyloid and tau, we now have a bunch of promising new leads:
- insulin and liver dysregulation impacting the brain downstream via metabolic dysfunction
- herpesviruses crossing the blood brain barrier, eg after light head injury or traveling the nervous system
- gut microbiota imbalance causing immune, metabolic, or other dysregulation
- etc.
These same ideas are also plausible for MS, ADHD, etc.
apsec112
curious if you could link to relevant papers? Thanks!
GioM
There’s a good discussion in the previous article discussed on HN, including links to various papers.
okintheory
It's nice to live in a world where actions have consequences. When the media coverage got too much, Marc Tessier-Lavigne finally had to resign as president of Stanford, so he could focus on his job as a Stanford professor.
jbullock35
I can't tell whether your post is a joke. Yes, Tessier-Lavigne was forced to resign. But Stanford let him stay on as a professor. That was terrible: they should have kicked him out of the university.
rossdavidh
I'm no expert, but I suspect it is a longer process to remove someone from a tenured professor position, than to remove them as President. We don't know that they won't eventually happen.
shermantanktop
There are betrayals so severe that a grindingly slow due process is actually itself an addition betrayal. Not arguing for a kangaroo court, but tenure should not be a defense for blatant cheating.
LarsDu88
Based on the scale and impact of fraudulent results, I wonder if some form of LLM based approach with supervised fine-tuning could help highlight the actually useful research.
Papers are typically weighted by citations, but in the case of fraud, citations can be misleading. Perhaps there's a way to embed all the known alzheimer's research, then finetune the embeddings using negative labels for known fraudulent studies.
The the resulting embedding space (depending on how its constructed; perhaps with a citation graph under the hood?) might be one way to reweight the existing literature?
rossdavidh
I honestly cannot tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.
shermantanktop
Me neither. But it’s very much in keeping with other seriously-intended suggestions I’ve heard. Optimism is fine until it becomes just dreaming and wishing out loud.
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FollowingTheDao
The amyloid hypothesis, as described to me by someone working in the field, is not only wrong, but it is harmful to the patients. His research is studying that it is more probable that the plaques are actually protective and do not cause the memory loss and other disease symptoms directly. This idea was pushed aside and ridiculed for years all because of the greed and lies by people like Eliezer Masliah.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2907530/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3233/JAD-2009-1151
https://www.utmb.edu/mdnews/podcast/episode/alzheimer's---co...
leoc
I am going to point out how much the vibes have shifted here. When earthquake scientists gave false reassurances in the run-up to the 2009 earthquake at L'Acquila, likely contributing to the many deaths there, Italian criminal proceedings resulted. At that time, though, the usual suspects decided that this was science under attack and there was high-level protest and indignation that scientists might face legal consequences for their statements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake#Pro...
6LLvveMx2koXfwn
Why should scientists be held to higher account than, say, politicians?
imperfect_light
You're conflating outright fraud with a difference of scientific opinion?
Sadly this stems from a structural problem in biology and medicine, and is far from exclusive to the field of Alzheimer's. Some reforms are urgent, otherwise progress is going to be incredibly slow. The same pattern is repeated again and again. Someone publishes something that looks novel, but is either an exaggeration or a downright lie.
This person begins to attract funding, grant reviews and article reviews. Funding is used to expand beyond reasonable size and co-author as many articles as possible. Reviews mean this person now has the power to block funding and/or publication of competing hypotheses. The wheel spins faster and faster. And then, we know what the outcome is.
The solution is to make sure reviews are truly independent plus limitations on funding, group size and competing interests. I think that tenured researchers that receive public funding should have no stock options nor receive "consulting" fees from private companies. If they want to collaborate with industry, that's absolutely fine, but it should be done pro bono.
Furthermore, if you are a professor who publishes 2 articles per week and is simultaneously "supervising" 15 postdocs and 20 PhD students at 2 different institutions then, except in very few cases, you are no longer a professor but a rent seeker that has no clue what is going on. You just have a very well oiled machine to stamp your name into as many articles as possible.