Evidence Suggests Alzheimer’s Researcher Doctored Findings, Set Back Science by 16 Years
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July 26, 2022
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July 26, 2022Y’all, I am fuming.
I know I’m not the only one here who’s witnessed a loved one struggle with dementia/Alzheimer’s, and those of you who have will probably agree with me that it is a fate worse than death. Which is why it is so abhorrently disgusting that neuroscientist Sylvain Lesné of the University of Minnesota (UMN) appears to have doctored his research to support a hypothesis that was not accurate.
Science investigated the study and says it corroborated [neuroscientist Matthew] Schrag’s suspicions about Lesné’s research with the help of leading Alzheimer’s researchers and image analysts. The independent experts alleged that some images they reviewed were “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering.
The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant, told the publication. “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”
The report noted that the implication of the suspected fraudulent work means that hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) might have been wasted, and that the entire scientific field could have been searching in the wrong direction for the last 16 years for a cure for Alzheimer’s since thousands of studies were based on the study in question.
I. Am. Freaking. FUMING.
Already Karen Ashe, whose lab oversaw the research, has been quick to point the finger elsewhere:
Ashe portrayed herself as a victim in the scandal, claiming that it was “devastating to discover that a co-worker may have misled me and the scientific community through the doctoring of images,” even though she should have been scrutinizing Lesné’s work.
“It is, however, additionally distressing to find that a major scientific journal has flagrantly misrepresented the implications of my work,” she said, adding that the article, which had input from numerous top Alzheimer’s experts, “erroneously conflated the two forms of Abeta.”
If you’re not furious about the time, money, and resources that have been absolutely wasted in order to appease the egos of these researchers, think about it for more than a second. Scientists have spent a decade and a half using these lies as a jumping off point for their own research. Over 2,300 papers over the past 16 years have cited this study– that’s 2,300 opportunities to get closer to a treatment, even a cure, for Alzheimer’s that were utterly wasted. To think that those subsequent studies might have been able to slow the progression of my own grandmother’s dementia and spared my family some significant trauma, but didn’t because Lesné and probably Ashe thought their own professional reputation was more important, makes me absolutely livid.
I’m not really clear on what the legal implications are or if they could face criminal charges, but these “scientists” need to face justice for the harm they’ve caused to tens of millions of families. I’m taking this personally, and if you have a loved one affected by Alzheimer’s (or dementia at large, because let’s not pretend that advances in one wouldn’t contribute to advances in the other) you should, too. YOUR life, YOUR loved one, YOUR family has been negatively impacted by this gross hubris. Already faced with one of the hardest things a person can go through, Lesné and Ashe made it worse.
I’m not saying I hope they face a long, slow, lonely decline and death due to Alzheimer’s. I’m just saying it’s what their actions deserve.
2 Comments
This is why I used to mutter at disciplines getting too isolated: this whole thing could have been stopped by just one person hired by the lab who had put the effort into studying tech, and not as much into the study in question. They would be useless all other ways, but double checking this would put a stop on the whole thing before it was published.
Outside their subject, like traditional professors, good scientists can be incredibly naive. There are a number that live in an imaginary world in which no one called a scientist, at least their kind of scientist, would ever dream of either faking information, or ever hurting people.
Even when they know and can rattle off examples of all of the above.
This time, everyone paid the price.
I wonder if the lab would be interested in replacing one of them with my Aunt? She got “down sized” after an experiment where she stopped her boss from doing something like that, and the experiment proved her boss’ theory wrong. Now she’s been supervising “quality control” for a more commercial lab and says its awful: they don’t seem to understand the concept “protocols”, “procedures” and so forth. She makes them do it right–which is why she was hired–and so is the most hated person in the company…which doesn’t pay well.
But, but, I have been told for years to always “trust the Science™”. What am I to do now?