Researchers to retract landmark Alzheimer's paper containing doctored images

&gt; published in Nature in 2006<p>So around 18 years ago. That’s a long time for researchers that believed in this papar&#x27;s conclusions to be going down the wrong rabbit hole. What a huge waste of effort and the lives of those with Alzheimer&#x27;s.

If one wants less fraud change incentives.<p>1. Grants and faculty positions should be less dependent on number of publications, and more on the quality of publications.<p>2. Place more emphasis on basic research and less on translational research. The latter encourages hyperbole and p-hacking. In the late 90s, the NIH initiated a strong emphasis that all research should have an immediate practical value. This is not reasonable and as a result, researchers grossly exaggerate the impact of their work, and some even engage in an outright fraud.

Elisabeth Bik has a twitter where, at least in the past, she exposed a bunch of questionable things in papers (lots of manipulated images or images copied from other papers)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;MicrobiomDigest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;MicrobiomDigest</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;MicrobiomDigest&#x2F;status&#x2F;902016709019672577" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;MicrobiomDigest&#x2F;status&#x2F;902016709019672577</a><p>These efforts are just going to accelerate with AI applied, new and exciting frauds will be discovered.

Karen Ashe attended Harvard for both her undergrad and MD. With all the academic fraud committed by Harvard connected people that has come to light in the past few years, one really has to wonder what is up with that institution (and higher ed more generally).

&gt; Lesné, who did not reply to requests for comment, remains a UMN professor and receives National Institutes of Health funding. The university has been investigating his work since June 2022. A spokesperson says UMN recently told Nature it had reviewed two images in question, and “has closed this review with no findings of research misconduct pertaining to these figures.” The statement did not reference several other questioned figures in the same paper. UMN did not comment on whether it had reached conclusions about other Lesné papers with apparently doctored images.<p>Horrifying. 2 years investigating and they’ve commented on two images?

&gt; Neuroscientist Karen Ashe plans to retract her team’s landmark Alzheimer’s paper after acknowledging that it contains manipulated images. The 2006 study, which suggested that the disease could be caused by an amyloid beta protein, has been cited nearly 2,500 times. “I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on the discussion site PubPeer, adding that she stands by the paper’s conclusions.<p>&gt; Scientists are divided over whether the problems with the paper undermine the dominant, yet controversial, theory that beta-amyloid plaques are a root cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

This article contains the actual alleged doctored images:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;potential-fabricatio...</a>

I&#x27;m amazed at how this one specific easily detectable type of fraud is so common. One has to wonder about all the other, less obvious, ways of comitting fraud and how common they must be.

There&#x27;s a strong incentive to get a high citation count for your papers. This encourages behavior like the manipulations we&#x27;re seeing here, on the part of fraudsters. But it also fails to incentivize caution on the part of researchers who cite existing works. If there were a &quot;bamboozled count&quot; that showed how many times a researcher cited a work that was later retracted, that would incentivize people to be a little more cautious, and perhaps avoid citing work of people who are suspected to be fudging the numbers.

Too late, the tens of thousands of papers citing this paper and drawing conclusions based on it won&#x27;t be retracted. Nor would be retracted papers based on papers based on this paper.

People have been using these mice as mouse model of alzheimer&#x27;s for decades, so there must be something here. It&#x27;s not like the whole research direction was &quot;wrong&quot;

One red flag should be that nowhere in this news article is the reader made aware of the exact nature of the manipulated images or their implications. If you go to the linked pubpeer review page you&#x27;ll find why -- it&#x27;s much less dramatic and all the findings were also replicated following this inquiry to show that any image alteration, that might have been made for editorial purposes, does not affect conclusions....<p>Drama drama drama, feed the people more drama... <i>sigh</i>

I still firmly believe a large portion of alzheimer cases are due to candida or other forms of gut dysbiosis, leading to the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier. Candida then enters the brain and the glial cells break down the candida producing amyloid plaques. But the root cause is from the gut.

I have been reading Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia. I believe this research is used in the book to talk about Alzheimer&#x27;s. I&#x27;m guessing the book will have to be revised. Gonna have to check in the acknowledgements of the book now.

They should be sent to prison for this, as should all fraudulent researchers big and small.

I know 2 people including my own mother who died of Alzheimer&#x27;s and one who has it right now. Who knows where would we be right now if we didn&#x27;t go on the wrong track with this fraudulent paper? Things like this is why trust in scientists are at an all-time low. There&#x27;s corruption at every single layer of our society and I don&#x27;t know what we can do to get honor and honesty back as top moral goals for citizens.<p>This amyloid theory has been completely debunked at this point but has wasted almost two decades of progress because of it. It&#x27;s so infuriating, but I don&#x27;t see this stopping because there&#x27;s no accountability.

This person Lesné shouldn’t have a job at a university after this. In fact, I strongly believe this person should be behind bars for having swindled the government and tax payers out of many millions of dollars in wasted grant money. The incentives for perpetuating this kind of fraudulent research have to be utterly devastating to those who do it to even hope for a deterrence against future malfeasance.

I actually know one of the guys who faked this data from a young age. He was basically losing his mind because of rage issues due to his extreme phobia of being poor&#x2F; falling into poverty. It’s interesting to me how these companies basically played into his fear of losing his funding to push this BS.