The key theory of what causes Alzheimer’s disease may be based on ‘manipulated’ data which has misdirected dementia research for 16 years – potentially wasting billions of pounds – a major investigation suggests.
A six-month probe by the journal Science reported “shockingly blatant” evidence of result tampering in a seminal research paper which proposed Alzheimer’s is triggered by a build-up of amyloid beta plaques in the brain.
In the 2006 article from the University of Minnesota, published in the journal Nature, scientists claimed to have discovered a type of amyloid beta which brought on dementia when injected into young rats.
It was the first substance ever identified in brain tissue which could cause memory impairment, and seemed like a smoking gun.
The Nature paper became one of the most-cited scientific articles on Alzheimer’s ever published, sparking a huge jump in global funding for research into drugs to clear away the plaques.
Of course, this aids in explaining why I’ve been snarling at Murphy these decades. No, not because I have a differently caused Alzheimer’s, but because errors in analysis of causes lead to horrible problems in designing solutions…..
Since then, universities, research institutions and pharmaceutical companies have spent billions investigating and trialling therapies to clear the brain of amyloid, but none have worked.
Hmm.
Sigh
Everybody knows that Alzheimers is caused by… erm… you know… thing…
Every year, more recently every month, brings bad news. The sciences as pursuits for enthusiasts who were obsessively interested in them were a wild success. The sciences as outlets for unscrupulous careerists are dismal and dangerous things; mass science, in other words. “The Science”, as the Covid frauds and fascists coo. “Settled science”, as the global warming scammers sing. The “mainstream” that the most moronic scientist of my acquaintance always applauded unquestioningly.
When you find that one of your colleagues is a crook you hope there aren’t many others. Then you think “if there are so few how come I’ve stumbled across one?” You can’t become disillusioned unless you were illusioned in the first place, and I have become utterly fucking disillusioned.
It really is time to call in the machine-gunners.
Errors in analysis is one of the main problems/pitfalls in biology… Especially the medical field where people want to be…right.. and get infected by Medicine Man God Syndrome.
I’ve a feeling that half the beef with the “Doctoring” has to do with those billions of $$ spent on this particular tack of treatment. With no result. As usual. And, quite frankly, I’ve always been in the “as expected” camp.
The plaques are real, and the problem is in getting rid of them and/or prevent their formation. The trick is in doing that without killing off the afflicted nerve cells, which is …well.. very, very tricky…
There’s plenty stuff that removes the plaques and removes the residue.. Of course the collateral victims are… the very nerve cells you want to keep… The classic Cure Being Worse than the Affliction, on steroïds..
As-is, I’m curious in what way this fraud is supposed to have taken place.
Molecular biology is pretty unforgiving, and it’s not easy to jimmy results. Certainly not as easy as in, say…. Sociology or Economics.
There’s also been a lot of follow-up research in various fields that corroborated the original research and broke down the molecular mechanisms of the buildup process. In rats and humans.
And us biologists are an argumentative lot, so you can be assured that the original thesis has been tested to death.
The only thing that hasn’t appeared is a therapy that doesn’t kill the patient…
But we’ll see. I’m curious.
Covid: We have to shut down the entire economy until it’s all over.
Monkeypox: Oh no, how dare you suggest we shut anything down until monkeypox has gone away.
Covid: The Science demands we forcibly vaccinate everybody.
Monkeypox: Oh no, how dare you suggest we impose forced medical treatment on people.
Covid: The general population must change their behavior to protect the minority.
Monkeypox: The minority should change their behavior to protect themselves.
Oh, please God, no. The very idea that there are equivalents to Murphy in other fields of life – men so stupid, craven, narcissistic and corrupt that are similarly setting those fields back by decades due to their distortions of facts and commitment to denigrating and destroying their opposition – is too horrible to contemplate.
The real problem with the world latching onto a false solution isn’t the waste of money on chasing useless fixes, it’s the suppression of any research into alternatives that might be correct. In Tim’s terms, it’s central planning preventing a free market in ideas. That’s the problem when the amounts of money involved are huge enough that government funding is needed.
If any billionaire wishes to really help humanity they should set up a research fund for blue sky research that’s a cross between a lottery and an X-Prize. “Congratulations, your ticket came up, you get initial funding for researching ways to distil sunbeams from cucumbers. Here’s 100k to develop proof of concept, if you can do that you’ll get 1M for the next stage, if not, bye bye.” Sure, some money would be wasted but probably far less than if politicians leap on the first glimmer of success and prevent alternatives being researched.
Unsurprisingly, this is a bit like how DARPA works, except DARPA has specific goals. They also (mostly) avoid the bureaucracy ending up as self-perpetuating by hiring administrators on non-renewable, fixed term contracts.
No comment:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine” (1).
More recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote that “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness” (2).
Isn’t the first thing you do when you have oodles of dosh is set up the scenario and validate the assumptions, define tests and baselines so that you know exactly what difference your changes make.
Every day I discover more evidence that we are one of the stupidest species on the planet.
I wonder what the figures are of comparisons of the various lifestyles, or even intelligence, of those who suffer from Alzheimer’s or early onset dementia? One reads, or hears, of people famous in their field of work, developing this disease. In my own little corner of the world, a surgeon, classical pianist, and a high ranking military officer have turned into confused, scared, angry people who have forgotten most of their last lives. I accept it may just be because of their positions in society, or professions, that we learn about these inflictions, but could it be the use of their brainpower and stresses placed upon it? Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I have may wish to comment?
There’s an organic chemist blogger I follow, Derek Lowe, who recently published an article doubting that amyloid plaques were causing Alzheimer’s based on the huge number of failures.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/had-enough-eh
I wonder what he’s going to think of this?
It’s not as if this sort of thing has happened before where some scientist, convinced he has the answer to some phenomenon, fiddles his results until they prove his hypothesis and, by virtue of his somewhat arrogant personality, deforms his whole field and sends it off on a useless, or even positively harmful, course which is never fully corrected.
:cough: Ansel Keys :cough:
Tampered data leads to faulty decisions.
Now do climate science.
Kevin B +100
Greg:
Mann
Bradley
Hughes
Jones
Trenberth et al…….
@aaa:
My wife’s a librarian, and they have a chap called Tim Coates who used to be MD of Waterstones and has an unshakeable belief that this means he knows how to run libraries (ie like bookshops).
A colleague of hers once mentioned an article by Murphy that he thought was interesting. When she told him ‘Richard Murphy is the Tim Coates of the tax world’ he revised his opinion – completely, immediately, and without a second thought.
Molecular biology is pretty unforgiving, and it’s not easy to jimmy results.
It happens too often for that to be true.
It’s a complex field where sub-branches of sub-branches are almost impenetrably specialised, and it’s funded by billions of dollars from mega-corporations and big government. What could go wrong?
What do you lot make of that Wakefield chap and his MMR “investigations” ?
Was he making it all up ?
Exaggerating and believing his own hype ?
Right and hounded by the Establishment ?
Wakefield was an obvious fraud, and was cashiered for not declaring his commercial interest. He’s got wackier since he moved to the States.
But the real villains are the gatekeepers. People like Horton, who took over a year to denounce wakefield’s nonsense. Or Fauci, who insisted for over a year that you could catch AIDS around the family dinner table.
dearieme nails it. The idea that science advances by consensus is a snare and a delusion.
No idea about Wakefield’s science, but it was clear that something was going on with the combined jabs (even if the chances of any adverse reaction were minute), and the establishment insistence of “nothing to see here, move along” only made the whiff of possible cover-up that much stronger.
If I had kids lined up for their injections, I would probably be seriously studying the pros and cons of separate jabs.
Science used to advance funeral by funeral but now that outside philanthropic organisations and interested companies are the source of research funding review and publication the idea they’re flogging has to be deader than a Monty Python parrot before course correction happens.
BiW,
The problem was that doing your own research at the time was very difficult at the time, no Internet.
Master BiND was born in Cyprus and given a measles jab when born. When he was Then given MMR. When he about 6 there was Rubella scare and it was proposed that all kids be given MMR again. When we questioned the safety of repeat vaccines the nurse want sure. A week later she hadn’t been able to find out so we declined. That will have been around ‘92.
We’re not anti-vax but the lack of information was worrying. As you say, the way people were treated for having concerns made things worse.
The manner in which the covid ‘vaccine’ has been developed, ‘tested’ and introduced kind of taints all the vaccines that have gone before. If the vaccine industry (ie the private sector pharma companies and the State regulatory apparatus) can behave as they have done for Covid, one has to ask if they have done it before?
They’re worried about the billions of Pounds wasted in research – I’m pissed at the potentially millions of lives lost while researchers were mislead into chasing dead ends.
Watched the movie ‘Vaxxed’ which covers the MMR stuff a few years ago but not qualified to challenge or confirm some of the claims. However, I did look at the prevalence of autism and the numbers in the 1960/’70’s was 5 per 10,000. It is now 160 per 10,000.
I’ve been vaccinated with: Smallpox, Tetanus, Hepatitis, Polio, Measles, Mumps, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough, so definitely not an anti vaxxer, but in light of the health care disaster which has been the governments’ reaction to covid and the willingness of them and Pharma to foist an untested therapy into the population, I now wouldn’t touch anything they recommend with a barge pole.
If you haven’t seen ‘Plandemic’ you should. (The fact you won’t find it on YouTube implies it is rather closer to the truth than TPTB like).
The smoking gun Science gives us is two pairs of adjacent bands in adjacent lanes. They both look like honest loading issues. One sample is loaded more to the right side than the left. Unsurprisingly both bands show the same “side loading” pattern. The second lane, whoever loaded the gel has either nicked the top of the loading gel with the pipette, or blasted their sample into the well with such force it’s broken the loading gel. The nick appears, unsurprisingly, in both bands.
Both of these are things wot happen in labs.
I think I want to see more than this to cry “fraud”.
numbers in the 1960/’70’s was 5 per 10,000. It is now 160 per 10,000.
Addolf, I suspect that might be more with autism being redefined. What used to be “naughty” or “disruptive” or “obsessive” now becomes “autism” as a catch-all for slightly unusual behaviour.
FWIW I reckon that Wakefield was onto something and then managed to exaggerate the scope and extent of the problem, using dodgy data to back it up. The result being that he had to be shut up for scaring the horses, but (on the balance of probabilities ) rightly so for excessive… zeal.