Faked Beta-Amyloid Data. What Does It Mean? | Science | AAAS

Late last week came this report in Science about doctored images in a series of very influential papers on amyloid and Alzheimer’s disease. That’s attracted a lot of interest, as well it should, and as a longtime observer of the field (and onetime researcher in it), I wanted to offer my own opinions on the controversy. First off, I’ve noticed a lot of takes along the lines of “OMG, because of this fraud we’ve been wasting our time on Alzheimer’s research since 2006”. That’s not really the case, as I’ll explain. But don’t get your hopes up: from one point of view, the main inaccuracy in that statement is that we’ve been actually been wasting our time in Alzheimer’s research for even longer than that. So that's not very comforting, either. We’ll start with some background and history, the better to appreciate the current furor in context. Those of you who know the field can skip ahead to later sections as marked, but your admission ticket is valid for the entire length of the ride if you

Late last week came this report in Science about doctored images in a series of very influential papers on amyloid and Alzheimer’s disease. That’s attracted a lot of interest, as well it should, and as a longtime observer of the field (and onetime researcher in it), I wanted to offer my own opinions on the controversy. First off, I’ve noticed a lot of takes along the lines of “OMG, because of this fraud we’ve been wasting our time on Alzheimer’s research since 2006”. That’s not really the case, as I’ll explain. But don’t get your hopes up: from one point of view, the main inaccuracy in that st