It's time to stop smiling.
Yeah, uh-oh I would like to believe that science will come up with treatments for cognitive decline as I age. I don't know. Alzheimer's is a big problem. It is of concern to young people because we always get seminars on Alzheimer's from our graduating seniors. Drug trials seem to flop against the disease. There is a chance that 16 years of research has been misinterpreted by one study.
The first author of that influential study, published in Nature in 2006, was an ascending neuroscientist: Sylvain Lesné of the University of Minnesota (UMN), Twin Cities. His work underpins a key element of the dominant yet controversial amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s, which holds that Aβ clumps, known as plaques, in brain tissue are a primary cause of the devastating illness, which afflicts tens of millions globally. In what looked like a smoking gun for the theory and a lead to possible therapies, Lesné and his colleagues discovered an Aβ subtype and seemed to prove it caused dementia in rats.
The University of Minnesota was the reason for it.
The paper that set the field in motion seems to have been fake.
A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schrag’s suspicions and raised questions about Lesné’s research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.
The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”
Lesné hasn't spoken in a long time. There is an investigation going on. I am certain that lawyers are standing by.
The evidence is built around Western blotting. Someone in the lab was patching up the data to make it look more convincing after a bunch of published data showed evidence of tampering. The evidence of copy/pasting and merging jump out at you, even though human eyes aren't very good at it.
Why does anyone pull this type of data? It doesn't exist if the data doesn't show it or if it can't be analyzed with a statistical analysis. If you want to compensate for a negative result, you have to do something else.
This is a big deal. A researcher faked data in order to get a paper in Nature and now the industry is built on a false foundation.
The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled “amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s” has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.
The paper provided an “important boost” to the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypotheses when they faced rising doubts, Südhof says. “Proponents loved it, because it seemed to be an independent validation of what they have been proposing for a long time.”
It's great. Confirmation bias and forgery are a great combination.
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