Alzheimer’s is a devastating disease whose cruel impact is only growing with our aging population. Nearly 7 million Americans suffer from it now, and it disproportionately affects Latinx and Black communities. Scientists have been working to understand and treat Alzheimer’s for decades. But recent whistleblowing has called some of that work into question, leading to confusion, drama and a public reckoning. In Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s, journalist Charles Piller, who first reported on the situation in Science magazine in 2022, reveals, beat by beat, what led to that inflection point.
The sources of upheaval include unethical dynamics between drug companies and regulatory agencies, as well as the preponderance of support for a particular hypothesis about Alzheimer’s. Both of these factors were accelerated by studies whose images of brain tissue were likely falsified, in particular a 2006 study that has been cited over 2,000 times, yet whose results could never be replicated. The drug company Cassava Sciences used the study to create Simufilam, an experimental drug they claim improves cognition. As a result of whistleblowing within the Alzheimer’s research community, as well as journalism by Piller, the 2006 study has been retracted and the body of research by the scientist responsible for the images, University of Minnesota’s Sylvain Lesné, is under scrutiny.
Piller describes this situation as simply “the latest example of the exaggeration, hype, and sheer fakery and fraud that has characterized Alzheimer’s research for decades.” Enter the whistleblower, Matthew Schrag, “a softspoken, nonchalantly rumpled junior professor at Vanderbilt University.” Schrag assembled dossiers that outlined the problems with images in dozens of studies, including the 2006 Lesné study. Piller shared these dossiers with other experts, who agreed with their validity. What strikes the reader of Doctored is that Schrag’s skepticism and image analysis did not rely only on scientific expertise, but also on an understanding of how images can be manipulated. He told Piller that some of the images in the studies simply looked too perfect; a little bit of careful, purposeful digging was all that was required to begin to show the dark shadows behind their facades.
People touched by this disease in any way will want to read Doctored, both to get a sense of how Big Pharma is impacting treatment options, and to learn about efforts like Schrag’s to correct course.
