‘In science, truth always wins,’ said the molecular biologist Max Perutz. In 2022, Charles Piller, an investigative journalist for Science, published an article posing a new set of obstacles to Perutz’s truism. He revealed cases of fabricated data in the area of Alzheimer’s research, setting off a cascading set of consequences for the researchers involved and for the field more generally. Doctored details how the dossiers of evidence were compiled in the lead-up to the publication of that 2022 article and the subsequent fall out.
The central character is Matthew Schrag, a scientist at Vanderbilt University, who provided the expert analysis for Piller. The book is centred on the developing relationship between Schrag and Piller and interwoven with interviews with research scientists and people affected by Alzheimer’s. It is an account of a story that has been playing out recently in universities, journals, biotech companies and peer review platforms, but has been largely unnoticed by the public.
Piller and Schrag exposed in detail two cases where scientific data showed evidence of manipulation over many years. The first was a series of papers by the academic behind Cassava Sciences, a company that produced an experimental Alzheimer’s treatment. The second had at its heart a post-doctoral researcher, Sylvain Lesné, working at the University of Minnesota, who in 2006 reported a previously undetected form of beta-amyloid.
Beta-amyloid is one of the proteins that form clumps in the brain during Alzheimer’s, proposed under the ‘amyloid cascade hypothesis’ to trigger an unstoppable avalanche of events ultimately leading to the death of brain cells and the accompanying hollowing out of memory and selfhood.
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