Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's with Charles Piller

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of Inquiring Minds, host Indre Viskontas speaks with investigative journalist Charles Piller about his explosive new book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's. Piller unearths the troubling reality behind decades of Alzheimer's research, exposing how fraudulent data, unchecked ambition, and institutional failures have shaped the field—and wasted billions of dollars—while millions of patients and families await real solutions. Piller shares: How a single falsified study published in Nature helped cement the amyloid hypothesis as the dominant theory of Alzheimer’s, despite mounting evidence against it. The role of NIH funding incentives in steering researchers toward confirming flawed findings instead of exploring alternative approaches. The rise of scientific sleuths and whistleblowers like Matthew Schrag, who uncovered image manipulation in key Alzheimer’s studies. The institutional failures of major scientific journals, regulatory agencies, and funding bodies that allowed bad science to shape drug development for decades. Why Alzheimer’s patients and their families are still waiting for effective treatments, and what promising new directions could finally lead to breakthroughs. Despite the troubling revelations, Piller also highlights reasons for optimism, including emerging research into alternative causes of Alzheimer’s, such as viral infections and neuroinflammation, and promising clinical trials involving GLP-1 inhibitors. Listen in for a gripping and eye-opening discussion about how scientific fraud derailed progress in Alzheimer’s research—and how we can chart a new path forward. Doctored is available now at booksellers everywhere.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You and Betty and the nancy's and bills and joes and James will find in the study of science
0:06.6	a richer, more rewarding life.
0:09.7	Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Andrevis Gontas.
0:13.1	This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.
0:17.2	We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.
0:21.6	On this podcast, I'd like to think that we're helping each other make decisions that impact our society and that these decisions are grounded in science, good science.
0:42.9	But sometimes science that we think is good science is actually built on a false foundation.
0:50.3	Many scientific disciplines have gone through a reckoning over the past couple of decades where
0:55.2	studies have failed to replicate, established findings have been overturned. That shouldn't shake
1:01.7	our confidence in science as a tool to get us closer to the truth because it's actually doing its
1:07.9	job, right? The scientific method is self-correcting. And the
1:11.9	reproducibility crisis has led to even more checks and balances. And that ensures that we get
1:19.0	even closer to the facts, you know, like the real facts. But this story that we're going to talk
1:26.5	about today is in some ways a whole other level.
1:29.3	We're going to delve into the foundation of the way science is conducted, especially in the U.S.
1:36.3	It is going to be fairly U.S.-centric, and just the entire field and how little mistakes early on could lead to disastrous consequences.
1:50.8	And those disastrous consequences have been many millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars,
1:57.0	invested in therapies that have proven to be unsuccessful, at least thus far.
2:04.4	So I'm not going to tell you much more about exactly what we're going to be talking about
2:08.3	because we'll get to that in a minute.
2:10.2	But first, I'd like to introduce the person that will be telling the story.
2:14.1	Charles Pillar is an investigative journalist for Science Magazine,
	...

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