What did those Alzheimer’s researchers lie about?
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The researchers used a photo enhancement program on pictures called “western blots”, which are a way of looking at what proteins are in a sample of material (in this case, brains). This would be perfectly OK, if they mentioned that they did it, but they didn’t. The result was that the pictures gave a false impression of how much of a particular protein was in the samples. Whether they meant to deceive people, or were just sloppy in the way that they handled the data is a something that people are looking into.
What does it mean? Well, in the end, probably not so much. The impression that the paper gave was that there was a lot of a protein called beta amyloid in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s and none in those without. This is actually true and supported by other studies; it’s just that this paper over-emphasized just how much. Many people feel that this influenced people to spend more time on studying beta amyloid and less on other proteins involved than they should have. While there might be some truth to that, the fact of the matter is that beta amyloid clumps (plaques) in Alzheimer’s brains are very real and very visible, so researchers were never going to ignore them.
To say that the situation made 30 years of Alzheimer’s research irrelevant is just dumb.
Nonetheless, it’s a very serious thing when a scientific paper misleads (perhaps intentionally), and it’s a black eye for the process of peer review that didn’t catch it (though, it probably couldn’t have been caught with tools of the day).
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