This should have been the lead story on every newscast this weekend when one thinks about how many people and their families are suffering from this insidious disease.
A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for Schragβs suspicions and raised questions about LesnΓ©βs research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimerβs researchersβincluding George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)βreviewed most of Schragβs findings at Scienceβs request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in LesnΓ©βs papers. Some look like βshockingly blatantβ examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimerβs expert at the University of Kentucky.
The authors βappeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,β says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant. βThe obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to β¦ better fit a hypothesis.β
tldr - The last 16 years of Alzheimers research and all the money spent on that research and developing drugs is based on data that is extremely likely to be fraudulent. So the state of the research is set back about 16 years.