16 years of Alzheimer's research possibly down the toilet

TLDR ?

 

Why is this thread in D&D?

 

How do multiple experts miss blatant image tampering from 2006?

Sounds like willful ignorance.

 

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) narrowly approved the use of Aduhelm, a new drug from Biogen that the company has priced so highly that it’s expected to drive up the price of Medicare for everyone in America, even those who never need this drug. Aduhelm was the first drug to be approved that fights the accumulation of those "amyloid plaques" in the brain. What makes the approval of the $56,000-a-dose drug so controversial is that while it does decrease plaques, it doesn’t actually slow Alzheimer’s. In fact, clinical trials were suspended in 2019 after the treatment showed “no clinical benefits.” (Which did not keep Biogen from seeking the drug’s approval or pricing it astronomically.)

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2022...iberate-fraud-that-has-cost-millions-of-lives

 

Scary ****. He killed half of all life in the universe.

 

Eh, the "16 years down the toilet" narrative isn't really right. A lot of those experiments questioned the central hypothesis and didn't support it. Those data are useful.

Hope: (1) they can really PORVE the falsification, and (2) they frogmarch anyone who new the truth but didn't speak.

 

This is pretty crazy and will have large ramifications. I still have undergrad papers/presentations I did at UT based on this while working towards a neurobio degree.

I had been using this as an explanation for Alzheimer's disease for what seems like forever now in terms of research time... This kind of reminds me of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal

But this will have a much larger impact since you're playing with people's lives. If people didn't trust science before, this will certainly be an extra talking point... Especially in terms of time wasted

 

Exactly

 

Trust Science

 

That's Thanos's step bro. He snapped and wiped out half the bad data.

 

That's a pretty unsettling article. I really don't know enough about this research to have a solid opinion on whether to agree or not but it does show that contrary to a lot belief the institution of science will seek to correct itself. Bad science does exist and there are scientist who out of a desire to pursue fame and funding but there are also many scientist out to prove other scientist wrong.

The nature of scientific method is to foster doubt and to poke holes at even theories that appear sacrosanct. For example many consider Einstein to be unassalable yet much of physics for the last 60 years has been about proving Einstein wrong.

That doesn't mean we should not trust the science but we need to understand how science and the context of science. In things like Climate Change or Evolution where there is much political controversy there isn't much scientific controversy because those theories have withstood decades of challenges, centuries in the case of Evolution. Again there is still a possibilty they are wrong but that possiblity is less and less likely as more evidence mounts. The theory that amyloid plaques cause Alzheimers is a relatively new theory based on limited research so it shouldn't be surprising there are holes being found in it.

 

Schön was such an idiot at some level. As I remember it, he was busted for using the same figure in several different papers, but each paper was supposed to show new data for a different material than the first one. When first questioned, I remember him basically saying "the data were still correct and basically the same for each sample, but I just wanted to use the clearest figure of data."

According to your wiki link there, he sued the university that revoked his doctorate and, in the first trial, won. LOL. But they won on appeal.

The interesting thing about this new allegation is that comes from a non-dissimilar time, the early naughts.

 

Finding out these frauds are a good thing in the long run for science. That photoshopping scam is a common one. Another one for science is when you look really hard under the microscope and find the impact that you're looking for from the drug in one section of the sample, but the truth is that it's only happening in one place and not to the entire sample.

Social science had a big fraud about 9 years ago when this PhD student from a really good school (and got accepted to a tenure track professor job at UCLA I think) made up a ton of data to test maybe social-contact theory or something like that. Basically, the dude showed statistical proof that the more people got to meet gay people in their lives, that they would become more accepting of gay people. Anyhow, that fraud (pretty sure he lost his degree and job offer, though wouldn't be suprised if he was doing well - still a very smart dude) lead to a big change in the academic poli-sci world where all your data is submitted to like this public database for nerds so that everyone can verify your studies/articles/research. That was a huge shift in policy and norms among social science research nerds.

 

[ comment on social science data redacted. ]

 

Found it. He was a UCLA student who got offered a job at Princeton.
https://slate.com/culture/2015/06/g...ockman-uncovered-a-huge-scientific-fraud.html
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8720975/science-fraud-replication

And then there's the neuroscience one that is controversial and potential fraud / photoshop / coma research.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02682-5