What did those Alzheimer’s researchers lie about?
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A big part of Alzheimer’s is the formation of globs of protein called “amyloid beta” in the brain, but nobody knows exactly how AB causes brain damage and death, or whether it’s just a side effect.
In the late 90s a breed of mouse was created that has AB plaques, and also memory loss, supporting the hypothesis that AB was the cause and providing a great platform to experiment with the disease.
In 2006 a paper isolated a particular small AB protein called AB56 and apparently showed that it, in particular, became more abundant in the brains of mice as their memory loss progressed, suggesting that AB56 was the specific cause.
This paper was hugely influential, and led many scientists to focus on the apparent toxicity of AB and AB56 as the primary cause of Alzheimer’s.
To measure the abundance of AB56, the authors used a common technique, a “Western blot”, which uses an electric field to pull proteins through a jelly-like material, sorting them by size. A photo of the gel is the primary experimental data.
In the past month, researchers and image analysts writing in the prestigious journal Science have found that some of these images were doctored: protein bands were digitally copy-and-pasted to make the change in AB56 look more obvious.
The images were produced by one scientist in particular, Sylvain Lesné. Many other images in later papers including Lesne were also altered. In all cases, other scientists involved in the paper say that Lesne was the one who prepared the images for publication.
This is a huge setback for Alzheimer’s science since this paper encouraged other scientists to shift focus and funding away from other hypotheses about the true cause of Alzheimer’s.
However, while other scientists may have been misled by these results, and share some blame for not thoroughly cross-checking them, the 2022 Science article only implicates Lesne and nobody else.
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
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