Doctored
Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's
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- 17,99 €
Publisher Description
An Economist Best Book of 2025 So Far
For readers of Empire of Pain and Dopesick, a “gripping story of medical groupthink and warped incentives” (The Economist) that follows how Alzheimer’s disease treatment has been set back by corrupt researchers, negligent regulators, and the profit motives of Big Pharma.
Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s disease, a tragedy that is already projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Charles Piller’s Doctored shows that we’ve quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all along—led astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.
In this “riveting must-read master class in science journalism” (Gary Taubes, author of Rethinking Diabetes), Piller begins with a whistleblower—Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag—whose work exposed a massive scandal. Schrag found that a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist and a Nobel Prize–rumored director delivered apparently falsified data at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease.
Piller uncovers evidence that hundreds of important Alzheimer’s research papers are based on false data. In the process, he reveals how even against a flood of money and influence, a determined cadre of scientific renegades have fought back to challenge the field’s institutional powers in service to science and the tens of thousands of patients who have been drawn into trials to test dubious drugs. Piller “masterfully unfolds an epic tale of astounding fraud, scientific egos run amok, and steely heroism in the pursuit of truth, creating both a page-turner and a seminal account of deceit that will long be remembered alongside Theranos and Enron as a scandal for the ages” (Katherine Eban, author of Bottle of Lies).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alzheimer's research is a cesspool of faked results and moneygrubbing, according to this hard-hitting exposé. Science magazine journalist Piller (Gene Wars) delves into two scandals that rocked the medical establishment in recent years: CUNY neuropharmacologist Hoau-Yen Wang's alleged use of doctored "western blot" gels—which visually display proteins—in experiments seeming to show that the drug simufilam revives dead brain cells, and neuroscientist Sylvain Lesné's retraction of the 2006 paper that first linked Alzheimer's to an "amyloid-beta" protein after allegations that it was likewise based on doctored western blot gels. Piller first follows the story from the point of view of Matthew Schrag, a Vanderbilt University neurologist and amyloid skeptic who led the informally organized team of researchers that blew the whistle on Wang's and Lesné's doctored blots. He then ventures further afield, profiling more members of what he dubs the "amyloid mafia"—a clique of hotshot scientists, journal editors, and FDA officials who, Piller contends, discourage other lines of Alzheimer's research because of their financial interests in the amyloid hypothesis. At times, Piller's narrative reads like a noirish detective story, complete with tense conversations with scientists who seem to be working an angle rather than facing facts ("The reason you are here is that I've forgiven you," says one researcher whose fraudulent work Piller exposed in Science). It's a troubling look at the corruption of Big Science.
