What did those Alzheimer’s researchers lie about?
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There’s a lot of wild and exaggerated speculation flying around right now. For a more reasonable summary of the whole situation, [this article](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/08/have-scientists-been-wrong-about-alzheimers-for-decades.html) does a fairly solid job (the title is very click-bait, but the article itself is reasonable).
Briefly – there’s evidence that some images in a highly cited 2006 paper may have been fabricated; this paper helped establish the connection between Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and the amyloid-beta protein (aβ). Because of this, some people have been questioning whether aβ really matters at all. However, even if we ignore that 2006 paper, there’s been numerous subsequent studies that have definitely established the connection with aβ (though the exact pathophysiological pathways of aβ, and whether aβ is a causal mechanism or simply a marker of disease, are still heavily debated).
Alzheimer’s is a relatively well-known disease and we still are far from any really successful treatment. So when this news came out, there were a lot of knee-jerk reactions that the past two decades of research is based on lies or misconceptions, but that’s not accurate. It just turns out that these kinds of neurodegenerative diseases (AD, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, etc.) are a very difficult nut to crack.
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