The Academic Culture of Fraud
In 2006, Sylvain Lesné and seven coauthors published a paper on Alzheimer’s disease, “A specific amyloid-beta protein assembly in the brain impairs memory,” in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. This was a major paper in the development of the “amyloid hypothesis,” a proposed mechanism for how Alzheimer’s disease afflicts its victims. About 50 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, more than the entire population of California, making it the world’s most common cause of dementia. This population will grow as the world’s average population gets older. There is no effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and its pathology is poorly understood. Any progress in understanding this disease represents a massive humanitarian victory. Encouraged by this paper and other promising studies, funding and talent poured into investigating the amyloid hypothesis. By 2022, such research had received over $1 billion in government funds.
