FWIS3

It looks like the paper that established a long standing theory of Alzheimer's disease - the theory that amyloid beta plaques are causative - may actually be fraudulent.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula ... /#comments

https://www.science.org/content/article ... rs-disease

This is... a lot. Almost the entire industry of Alzheimer's drug R&D was based on this theory AFAIK.

I saw that and it's absolutely mind-boggling. What a waste in every sense of the world.

Not the articles you linked, but I read one over the weekend that an astounding 96% or some such of all Alzheimers drugs are shown to fail, so this might be a part of it. And apparently Moderna this fall is going to unveil a drug that was so expensive it was going to raise Medicare costs for everyone in America- $56,000 a dose - which wasn't proven to help w Alzheimers, but was proven to reduce these types of plaques in your brain. JFC

I'm also astounded that apparently in biology everyone falls in line behind one paper like that. Does no one need to reproduce results?! Bonkers.

Sadly, this pattern seems to happen more often than I would like to see.
1. Study has faint evidence
2. create drug that has serious side effects or doesn't work
3. Market the hell out of the drug
4. Act shocked when new studies or evidence refutes effectiveness or proves new drug kills too many people
5. Lawyer up and start settling lawsuits
6. If lawsuits prove too expensive declare bankruptcy and/or merge with another company who has no liability or reduced liability
7. Lather, Rinse, Repeat

And yet, sometimes the bastards hit a home run. The cure for Hepatitis C, HIV management, and a host of other treatments that are very effective. It would be nice if we could just get all the good and almost none of the bad.

@Fisher, re the home runs, happy accidents seem par for the course in the sciences anyway I think? History of science is pretty wild, a lot of of world-changing discoveries happened because someone got lucky (and had the wit or intuition to take advantage of that luck).

Personally I suspect we'd see a higher percentage of home runs if we actually enforced consequences for fraud and corporate crime. But good luck with that in the modern US

Fisher, I think the difference here is with point 1): it wasn't faint evidence, it was strong evidence that was doctored (and supported a popular hypothesis, so maybe why no one looked more carefully until now). Which is, of course, really bad and worse than just tenuous evidence.

Also, nothing to do with corporate crime in this particular case, the scientists were at the University of Minnesota. I definitely smell a lawsuit or few, but in that sense of "it takes so many years you won't hear about it once it's done."