Science, lies, and visuals
To Dad… trust is at an all-time low and dropping faster than a bowling ball in vacuum because the people we are told to believe without question can (and, sadly far too often do) lie to us.
“Breathtaking.” That’s what neuroscientist Christian Haass said when he heard about Dr. Eliezer Masliah’s peer-reviewed papers on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s research. “People will, of course, be shocked, as I was … I was falling from a chair, basically.”
Unlike Leonard McCoy, I’m an ad guy, not a doctor. I have this friend. Augustine. He’s a doctor. Of ad fraud. He made some software that tests how many real people visit a website. But he won’t run it and give you a Good Housekeeping sticker if you pass. Because, he says, once you have the sticker you can lie with impunity. Money would be lost. Time would be wasted. Blather. Doctors, pfft.
Dr. Masliah has bona fides up the freaking wazoo. He’s been the senior leader of the National Institute of Aging since 2016. He has published 777 peer reviewed papers.
Lies.
Science, a leading peer review journal found “scores” of papers are “riddled” with falsified images of proteins and brain tissue. Some of them, the investigation shows, have been reused across papers published years apart to document entirely different experiments. The NIH dumped Masliah.
For thirty to forty years, despite extensive research, Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) has remained refractory -- that’s doc-speak for hard to treat. An anonymous Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean says that, “The central dogma of Alzheimer’s Disease, ACH, was constructed more than a hundred years ago. It has been an intuitive cul de sac that has yielded nothing to slow or stop the course of the disease.”
Decades of damage have been done that can’t be undone. You have to wonder how much time was lost. How much money was wasted. How many people’s lives have been impacted. And, this may not be an outlier.
At the end of the piece, scientists at Science, worried about how this apparent catastrophe could give, “Science a further black eye, just as the public’s confidence in science is sinking to new depths.”