Science Shoots Itself In The Foot Once Again

[Too big a post for Facebook] 

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It's obvious that climate change is false because these researchers appeared to have fabricated the evidence for Altzheimers disease.

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It's quite possible that years and years of research have been a waste of time, and that the millions and millions of dollars that have been channelled into funding for Altzheimers research have been misspent. 

According to research reported in the respected journal Science, crucial images from the landmark paper of 2006 in the respected journal Nature appeared to have been altered to bolster the conclusions of the paper. 

It is indeed possible that targeting those now notorious amyloid plaques in the brain by blocking a specific compound molecule, called an oligomer, is an expensive dead-end. Perhaps this is why 99% of the research for pharmacuetical and other treatment of Altzeimers have proven to be failures (e.g. nuns doing crossword puzzles for years) because they have been looking for results that might never have been measureable. 

The oligomer they are targetting might not even exist in humans, but only in the transgenic mice of the landmark paper, and those amyloid plaques might be merely incidental to whatever promotes dementia and not its cause after all.

AAANNNNDDDD the principal author of the original paper has just received a 5 year grant of $750k from the National Institue of Health to continue research along the same lines. The NIH honkey who ratified this grant turns out to have been... wait for it... a co-author of that 2006 paper.

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I want to point out that science is not at fault here. Scientists are. Possibly. He adds, hoping to avoid a law suit.

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Early this year, Schrag raised his doubts with NIH and journals including Nature; two, including Nature last week, have published expressions of concern about papers by Lesné. Schrag’s work, done independently of Vanderbilt and its medical center, implies millions of federal dollars may have been misspent on the research—and much more on related efforts. Some Alzheimer’s experts now suspect Lesné’s studies have misdirected Alzheimer’s research for 16 years.

“The immediate, obvious damage is wasted NIH funding and wasted thinking in the field because people are using these results as a starting point for their own experiments,” says Stanford University neuroscientist Thomas Südhof, a Nobel laureate and expert on Alzheimer’s and related conditions.

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To say this happens all the time in medicine would not be true, but it does happen a fair bit. There're liveliehood issues, grants, tenure, the kudos of conference invitations, egos...  thanks to the publish or perish mentality of academic institutions...

Beyond Andrew Wakefield's bullshit on MMR and autism, I know of two relatively close cases to me in my working life: 

1 - self-proclaimed thalidomide exposer (it was actually a widwife working with him) William McBride, was working at our local university. He was struck off for falsifying figures in his research into Debendox. Where are all these fucking rabbits? his researchers fellows eventually started asking. His wife, ironically, was chair of the research ethics committee at my old hospital.  

2 - back when I was still working in high-risk obstetrics, we heard of this whizz-kid research obstetrician in England. He had been asked by student at a meeting if it was possible to somehow retrieve a live ectopic pregnancy and replace into the uterus with a successful outcome. A few weeks later he published an article saying that he had done just that. Of course, he hadn't, and he was struck off after one of those present at that meeting brought this to general attention... [I have read of anti-abortion campaigners claiming this imaginary procedure as an actual option for those women with ectopics who would prefer not to die.] 

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Enough back to what you're supposed to be working on. You're not too young to write your memoirs anymore, 

E@L