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A super interesting article, but the title is pure clickbait. In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team spor

by svara 7y ago

A super interesting article, but the title is pure clickbait. In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous. Reality is much more nuanced, and the article actually does a good job of detailing that. In some sense this all started from the very beginning, from when Alzheimer's disease (AD) was first described: In 1911, Alois Alzheimer found plaques in his dementia patient's brain. [0] These plaques are what researchers would focus on for more than the next 100 years. Much later, the protein giving rise to the plaques (APP) was discovered and there seemed to be good evidence for a causal role: Mice with mutated APP developed AD. Quoting the article: """ By the mid-1990s, a now-defunct San Francisco biotechnology company, Athena Neurosciences, created the first genetically engineered mice with a mutated, amyloid-producing human gene. The animals’ brains filled with amyloid plaques, and their memories were destroyed. The mice were hailed as a “model for testing therapeutic [Alzheimer’s] drugs” """ So we should really take this story as a cautionary tale. There was, however, no conspiracy or "cabal". These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track. In a way, they were, since hereditary Alzheimer's is caused by APP mutations, it just turns out that this isn't as important as other ways of developing the disease. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Deter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Deter

michaelbarton 7y ago
> science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary Just one data point, but in my experience in academia that was almost exactly how I found it. The exception that it wasn't a team sport because there's only space for one first author. My feeling is that the recognition and 'impactfulness' tied to being successful in academia are antagonistic to conducting unbiased research.
- dmix 7y ago
  If you watched the NBA the top 5% of players/top 5 teams get 90% of the media attention. The rest who are still doing good and interesting things fight for the last 10% of the crumbs and are forever complaining they are being excluded despite performance and other factors. It happens in a lot of places. And to be honest it’s what most of the people want and while places like r/nba are more neutral and give respect where it is due, ESPN knows the casual 12yr old knows Lebron James and Steph Curry and they recruit “talent” to only talk about them, not just what is going well for the sport as a whole. It’s a difficult balance that is really up to the power players and the quality of leadership to get right. With science though you’d hope far more meritocracy than big names, but sadly I believe this is a human and non-expert efficiency thing (as most people are not really experts). Some people might blame capitalism of the bio firms but they are just the sum of their people who run and fund them too.
  - pharke 7y ago
    Exactly, it's human nature. No matter what arena it plays out in we only have so many patterns of behaviour at our disposal and you'll see the same types of power plays, favouritism, backbiting, and underhanded dealing. We're good at disguising this behaviour, dressing it up as professional ambition or rationalizing it but it's still the same dogged fight for a spot in the social hierarchy. We're not good at thinking rationally about things that involve our own benefit. We'll more often than not only think things through to the point where we avoid breaking any existing rules but still go with the lazy choice that benefits us in the short term.
    - blaser-waffle 7y ago
      > We're good at disguising this behaviour, dressing it up as professional ambition or rationalizing it but it's still the same dogged fight for a spot in the social hierarchy. If you're in a modern, first-world country you get to decide which part of the Pareto 80/20 divide you sit on. The world doesn't need more mediocre people.
- Certhas 7y ago
  I completely agree with your second sentence, but also with the OPs statement that there is no conspiracy to suppress correct results. There is intense competition to be right. There is intense competition for funds, so being perceived to be promising is hugely important. But at the end of the day I haven't really ever seen any explicit attempts to suppress uncomfortable results.
  - michaelbarton 7y ago
    I agree, that's fair. I don't think it's an explicit conspiracy. However there are some practices that do end up suppressing results. One particular example is that lack of publication of negative results because there is no incentive for doing so. You can imagine a scenario where similar experiments are repeated over and over again in different laboratories because no one writes up the negative result. After all what's the incentive? Not so bad for a few wasted weeks of PhD students time but potentially more damaging for large drug clinical trials? Ben Goldacre's bad science is a great book on this topic. He's an entertaining speaker too. He describes a solution to that particular problem which is registering a clinical trials beforehand. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/07/ben-goldacre-bad-pharma-interview https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/07/ben-goldacr...
    - ethbro 7y ago
      It's a good idea: have a fully-open repository where negative results can be documented. With the ability to tag on if a negative result is replicated. Then gradually re-enculture review boards to expect any given author to have a substantial number of results published to said repository, if they're actively performing research.
    - Certhas 7y ago
      Absolutely, but that's a form of self suppression, rather than a cabal of others suppressing results. Science is incredibly broken in many ways. I think the big underlying culprit is the prevailing ideology that every human activity is best organized as a competition for scarce resources.
  - 7y ago
- Psyladine 7y ago
  Michael Crichton said as much and the community turned on him.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    I tried to find more information and I'm struggling to find information that Michael Crichton said this exact thing and that turned the scientific community against him. I did find that he was a global warming skeptic and also believed in astral projection and auras and the like, both of which garnered scientific backlash. Could you help me clarify?
    - Psyladine 7y ago
      His talk 'Aliens Cause Global Warming' is about this phenomenon in all but name. Consensus science, marginalizing alternate theories and politicizing scientific inquiry. "your theories differ from mainstream" being a black mark rather than a point of inquiry.
      - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
        Right, was the backlash against his global warming skepticism? I'm still confused.
        Psyladine 7y ago
        Yes, his stance on global warming was controversial at the time and as he died only a few years later is more well known for that, but for reasons he himself laid out in the linked talk. Most relevant is that he was against consensus science, which was highlighted in the submission. Even if you are 'wrong' and in the group consensus, all is forgiven. If you are 'right' but not in the group, you are blackballed, and if you are wrong and not in the group consensus, you are crucified.
        amw 7y ago
        The backlash against Crichton was well-founded. He used the grain of truth that it's sometimes hard to get new ideas in science funded to build a crazy denialist foundation on that made for exciting fiction, but terrible description of reality.
aaron695 7y ago
> There was, however, no conspiracy or "cabal". These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track. No one thought the weapons of mass destruction were fake and lied and said they were real. The conspiracy was "These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track." so did not allow competing theories. Exactly the same with the VW emissions issue. This is exactly how conspiracies and cabals work. They are emergent behaviour.
- dnautics 7y ago
  The funny thing about that conspiracy is that the WMD were real. Hussein had them, and and its true that he didn't give them up, and he refused access. Here's the but: they were found by the US, under seal exactly in the place of record according to the UN. It's pretty clear that Hussein wasn't actively developing it anymore. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25546334 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25546334
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    Um, the article talks about the removal of an unrefined ingredient for a weapon, not exactly finished weapons.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - dnautics 7y ago
      Yes, the pre invasion claim made to the UN was that Iraq was in violation of its obligation to allow inspectors in to monitor its WMD program. I'm not justifying the actions of the administration or even the legal basis for it, but per my understanding, the claims were not untrue, notwithstanding how it was sold to the us public (especially as filtered by the complicit media)
  - temac 7y ago
    Your source for the belief tha Iraq had WMD is an article explaining they had yellowcake? Even a youtuber made some and processed it (and this was completely legal)
dnautics 7y ago
I think the evidence goes deeper than that. Humans with downs syndrome, which duplicates the APP gene, evince symptoms of Alzheimer's as they reach their 40s.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nextos 7y ago
  Genetics is important, but lots of current research in biology reduces everything to genetics. Paradoxically, when twin studies have shown environmental factors typically make an equally important contribution towards disease onset. For example, consider type 1 diabetes (T1D). Lots of research tries to understand genetic risk factors. Despite this being so difficult to translate into treatment, as its many small effects past the top 3 genes, and twin studies show 50% is contribution from the environment. So very recently, someone said OK the immune system is a classifier that takes sets of little protein chunks in a tissue microenvironment and decides whether its seeing self or something foreign and acts accordingly. Then, your own microbiome has to do something to avoid immune immune responses, as the immune system is only pre-trained using your own DNA. Then, let's assume your microbiome has to mimic (copy) some of your DNA to signal self to the immune system. And it turns out it is true [1]. Lots of bacteria mimic insulin. And when those bacteria end up being classified as non-self, you also destroy your pancreatic beta cells, which produce insulin. There's good evidence for lots of other diseases. For example, multiple sclerosis [2]. The first paper cites other diseases, including Alzheimer's that look like mis-classification induced by dysbiosis in the microbiome or an infection. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1 [2] https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/462/eaat4301 https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/462/eaat4301
datastoat 7y ago
What the linked article says: > In a sea of amyloid-focused grants, there are tiny islands of research on oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, and, especially, a protein called tau. The Wikipedia article you cite: > On examining her brain, he found senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles [which are made of tau protein -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofibrillary_tangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofibrillary_tangle] What you actually wrote: > In 1911, Alois Alzheimer found plaques in his dementia patient's brain. These plaques are what researchers would focus on for more than the next 100 years. You omitted the tangles and played up the plaques. It looks like you're part of the cabal!
- svara 7y ago
  You're right, I should have mentioned tau. But the viral link is the really big deal here that was overlooked for too long. > It looks like you're part of the cabal! I have no horse in this race ;) I only commented because the title seemed needlessly inflammatory to me. Everybody should just read the full article, like I wrote I think it's very good.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    > the title seemed needlessly inflammatory In the end, it's always the inflammation...
leftyted 7y ago
> In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous. I think that narrative is correct. We can't fix the problem if we don't discuss it. The whole "I believe in science" thing (which you seem to be pushing) is really quite silly. Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). I think this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of scientists are hangers-on, i.e. not capable of doing original research. These scientists are terrified of people who can do original research since it makes them look bad (and feel bad, it's actually depressing to think about all the people out there who are way smarter than me). You can imagine funding schemes that attempt to account for these issues. "For every dollar of funding for interpretation A, earmark 25 cents for alternative interpretations". View science as a market, something beyond our powers to predict, then diversify your investments.
- svara 7y ago
  I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but I think the politics of the funding game just reflect a fundamental problem for which I don't see an obvious solution: Science has to be conservative, in order to protect the integrity of the record of published findings. This can lead to a situation where a field gets stuck in a local optimum from which progress is no longer possible, because things that don't seem to fit are dismissed as implausible. But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! At the end of the day, the question is: can we somehow induce these necessary paradigm shifts more quickly? I really don't know.
  - btrettel 7y ago
    > But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! I think this framing is inaccurate. The alternative ideas aren't necessarily less plausible. The process by which science is funded does not accurately determine plausibility in my view. It's heavily swayed by factors it should be independent of like fads or sounding good to the proposal evaluator (who may not be an expert in the field) but having deeper issues. To quote from a book I have about writing grant proposals: > [...] writing a grant application is unlike writing a scholarly manuscript for publication in a prestigious professional journal. In the former case, your target audience is likely to be 1) a reader who is not particularly knowledgeable in the area of your proposal (except in a very general sense); 2) an individual who is overworked, tired, hassled, and intent on getting through the required reading as quickly as possible; and 3) someone committed to reading your proposal only because he or she has to. From p. 31 of the 2014 edition of this: http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ The status quo is not the best we can do.
dekhn 7y ago
"""feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous.""" This is precisely what modern science is (well, a major subset). The competition for grant funding and attention space is extremely intense. I agree there was no "alzheimer's cabal" but it's not uncommon in science for the prevailing mainstream position to (intentionally or otherwise) suppress alternative opinions ("extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence" is often used to maintain the status quo). One of the important issues is when an idea ends up dominating funding. If you have a legitimate alternative hypothesis but can't get the funding to run the experiments to provide that extraordinary evidence, you'll fail to convince people. The people who get the most funding are the ones who are the most competitive, not the smartest, or the rightest.
- dccoolgai 7y ago
  Interesting... Are there any current issues you can think of in academia where disagreeing with the prevailing opinion can make one a pariah... Even, perhaps, assigned an epithet like "denier"? I think whenever this happens in academia/science, it is incredibly dangerous. Proper science invites and celebrates denial - seeks to deconstruct it and understand it to be more certain of the truth. The mere presence of any other attitude is a strong smell that something is drastically wrong.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    It's not relevant today but a well-known virologist, Peter Duesberg, was an HIV-causes-AIDS denialist (before that he was very well known for real accomplishments in virology). However, he never showed any evidence to support his case and there was extensive evidence against it. If you want to be a denier, the reality is that you have to show a lot of compelling evidence both supporting your position, and against the mainstream position. Modern denialism tends to be more centered around climate change- whether it is occurring, and what the impacts will be in the near and long term, and how to respond. Many physics people (who worked on high energy particle physics, etc) have looked at the claims from the various climate change promoters and found the source evidence to be less than convincing. If they articulate this, they are often described as denialists. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer
amw 7y ago
I agree that the title is pure clickbait, I disagree that the article completely divorces itself from the premise the title implies. This whole thing where science journalism drums up this huge controversy after the fact when enough science on a topic has been performed to think that maybe a particular explanation is a bad one is a symptom of organizations that have to drum up a saucy narrative to sell. It is perfectly natural to fund science that seems like a good idea at the time, and not fund ideas that seem less plausible than the prevailing explanation, and while it does suck that it takes a while to overturn the idea that the idea is good, representing our 20/20 hindsight as some irredeemable inertia with conspiracist overtones is a big problem.
- volkse 7y ago
  The title isn’t “pure clickbait” although a little hyperbolic. I worked in a research laboratory in a top medical school in the US. The professor in charge of the lab was an amyloid sceptic, and the existence of this sort of “cabal” was apparent, at least to him. Words like “delusional” were thrown around. This was 7 years ago! Also, considering the actual harm caused, i don’t think you can be hyperbolic enough about this issue..
shakil 7y ago
See this other link for the case of a Colombian woman whose brain is full of the amyloid plaque but she is dementia free due to a genetic mutation. The biggest difference between her and the rest of her family that suffer from Alzheimer's is the fact that tau buildup is minimal in her brain. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/colombian-woman-s-genes-offer-new-clues-staving-alzheimer-s https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/colombian-woman-s-ge...
dang 7y ago
What's a better title? We can change it. Better = more accurate and neutral, using representative language from the article.
- hitekker 7y ago
  How about "Collusion" instead of "Cabal"? Wikipedia defines collusion as "a secret cooperation or deceitful agreement in order to deceive others, although not necessarily illegal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion
  - mcguire 7y ago
    You'd have to demonstrate 'deceit' and 'cooperation'.
  - dang 7y ago
    The word 'collusion' doesn't appear in the article and has its own triggering capacities these days. Best not to go there.
- mirimir 7y ago
  How about "The beta-amyloid paradigm thwarted progress toward an Alzheimer’s cure"?
  - dang 7y ago
    Ok, we'll use something like that. Thanks! Edit: I've changed it back because readers are divided on this.
  - hitekker 7y ago
    I disagree. The article articulates a political problem, not an error in reasoning. These few scientists did not just choose a stable approach that later turned out to be wrong: they doubled-down, tripled-down on a shakey guess for decades and suppressed voices to the contrary. The seemingly credentialed, respected, and authoritative experts of Alzheimer's sabotaged the science around a hot-button problem for their own personal gain, while society suffered the consequences. This antipattern can be seen as a kind of "academic rent-seeking" or "false-expertise". It can also be called "collusion" given that an organized group of people semi-intentionally marginalized their opposition at the outset, and at great cost to the broader public.
el_cujo 7y ago
>In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous. >Reality is much more nuanced, and the article actually does a good job of detailing that. It's bad to sow too much mistrust in science, sure, but it certainly feels like society right now is way too far in the opposite direction right now, with people blindly believing any headline following the phrase "a new study says..." or "scientists say...". A lot of scientific fields are very competitive for funding right now, there is immense pressure to twist every result into a "win" while equally important null results ("we tried X and surprisingly it did not worked") are basically treated as worthless. People shouldn't blindly mistrust science, but blind trust is just as dangerous, the system right now is far from perfect. I believe most researchers still ultimately want to solve mysteries in nature and improve life, but they're also human beings who ultimately want to be able to keep working and provide for themselves and their families, these two motivations are not always perfectly aligned.

by svara 7y ago

michaelbarton 7y ago

> science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary Just one data point, but in my experience in academia that was almost exactly how I found it. The exception that it wasn't a team sport because there's only space for one first author. My feeling is that the recognition and 'impactfulness' tied to being successful in academia are antagonistic to conducting unbiased research.

dmix 7y ago
If you watched the NBA the top 5% of players/top 5 teams get 90% of the media attention. The rest who are still doing good and interesting things fight for the last 10% of the crumbs and are forever complaining they are being excluded despite performance and other factors. It happens in a lot of places. And to be honest it’s what most of the people want and while places like r/nba are more neutral and give respect where it is due, ESPN knows the casual 12yr old knows Lebron James and Steph Curry and they recruit “talent” to only talk about them, not just what is going well for the sport as a whole. It’s a difficult balance that is really up to the power players and the quality of leadership to get right. With science though you’d hope far more meritocracy than big names, but sadly I believe this is a human and non-expert efficiency thing (as most people are not really experts). Some people might blame capitalism of the bio firms but they are just the sum of their people who run and fund them too.
- pharke 7y ago
  Exactly, it's human nature. No matter what arena it plays out in we only have so many patterns of behaviour at our disposal and you'll see the same types of power plays, favouritism, backbiting, and underhanded dealing. We're good at disguising this behaviour, dressing it up as professional ambition or rationalizing it but it's still the same dogged fight for a spot in the social hierarchy. We're not good at thinking rationally about things that involve our own benefit. We'll more often than not only think things through to the point where we avoid breaking any existing rules but still go with the lazy choice that benefits us in the short term.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    > We're good at disguising this behaviour, dressing it up as professional ambition or rationalizing it but it's still the same dogged fight for a spot in the social hierarchy. If you're in a modern, first-world country you get to decide which part of the Pareto 80/20 divide you sit on. The world doesn't need more mediocre people.
Certhas 7y ago
I completely agree with your second sentence, but also with the OPs statement that there is no conspiracy to suppress correct results. There is intense competition to be right. There is intense competition for funds, so being perceived to be promising is hugely important. But at the end of the day I haven't really ever seen any explicit attempts to suppress uncomfortable results.
- michaelbarton 7y ago
  I agree, that's fair. I don't think it's an explicit conspiracy. However there are some practices that do end up suppressing results. One particular example is that lack of publication of negative results because there is no incentive for doing so. You can imagine a scenario where similar experiments are repeated over and over again in different laboratories because no one writes up the negative result. After all what's the incentive? Not so bad for a few wasted weeks of PhD students time but potentially more damaging for large drug clinical trials? Ben Goldacre's bad science is a great book on this topic. He's an entertaining speaker too. He describes a solution to that particular problem which is registering a clinical trials beforehand. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/07/ben-goldacre-bad-pharma-interview https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/oct/07/ben-goldacr...
  - ethbro 7y ago
    It's a good idea: have a fully-open repository where negative results can be documented. With the ability to tag on if a negative result is replicated. Then gradually re-enculture review boards to expect any given author to have a substantial number of results published to said repository, if they're actively performing research.
  - Certhas 7y ago
    Absolutely, but that's a form of self suppression, rather than a cabal of others suppressing results. Science is incredibly broken in many ways. I think the big underlying culprit is the prevailing ideology that every human activity is best organized as a competition for scarce resources.
- 7y ago
Psyladine 7y ago
Michael Crichton said as much and the community turned on him.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  I tried to find more information and I'm struggling to find information that Michael Crichton said this exact thing and that turned the scientific community against him. I did find that he was a global warming skeptic and also believed in astral projection and auras and the like, both of which garnered scientific backlash. Could you help me clarify?
  - Psyladine 7y ago
    His talk 'Aliens Cause Global Warming' is about this phenomenon in all but name. Consensus science, marginalizing alternate theories and politicizing scientific inquiry. "your theories differ from mainstream" being a black mark rather than a point of inquiry.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      Right, was the backlash against his global warming skepticism? I'm still confused.
      - Psyladine 7y ago
        Yes, his stance on global warming was controversial at the time and as he died only a few years later is more well known for that, but for reasons he himself laid out in the linked talk. Most relevant is that he was against consensus science, which was highlighted in the submission. Even if you are 'wrong' and in the group consensus, all is forgiven. If you are 'right' but not in the group, you are blackballed, and if you are wrong and not in the group consensus, you are crucified.
      - amw 7y ago
        The backlash against Crichton was well-founded. He used the grain of truth that it's sometimes hard to get new ideas in science funded to build a crazy denialist foundation on that made for exciting fiction, but terrible description of reality.

aaron695 7y ago

> There was, however, no conspiracy or "cabal". These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track. No one thought the weapons of mass destruction were fake and lied and said they were real. The conspiracy was "These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track." so did not allow competing theories. Exactly the same with the VW emissions issue. This is exactly how conspiracies and cabals work. They are emergent behaviour.

dnautics 7y ago
The funny thing about that conspiracy is that the WMD were real. Hussein had them, and and its true that he didn't give them up, and he refused access. Here's the but: they were found by the US, under seal exactly in the place of record according to the UN. It's pretty clear that Hussein wasn't actively developing it anymore. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25546334 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25546334
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  Um, the article talks about the removal of an unrefined ingredient for a weapon, not exactly finished weapons.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - dnautics 7y ago
    Yes, the pre invasion claim made to the UN was that Iraq was in violation of its obligation to allow inspectors in to monitor its WMD program. I'm not justifying the actions of the administration or even the legal basis for it, but per my understanding, the claims were not untrue, notwithstanding how it was sold to the us public (especially as filtered by the complicit media)
- temac 7y ago
  Your source for the belief tha Iraq had WMD is an article explaining they had yellowcake? Even a youtuber made some and processed it (and this was completely legal)

dnautics 7y ago

I think the evidence goes deeper than that. Humans with downs syndrome, which duplicates the APP gene, evince symptoms of Alzheimer's as they reach their 40s.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nextos 7y ago
Genetics is important, but lots of current research in biology reduces everything to genetics. Paradoxically, when twin studies have shown environmental factors typically make an equally important contribution towards disease onset. For example, consider type 1 diabetes (T1D). Lots of research tries to understand genetic risk factors. Despite this being so difficult to translate into treatment, as its many small effects past the top 3 genes, and twin studies show 50% is contribution from the environment. So very recently, someone said OK the immune system is a classifier that takes sets of little protein chunks in a tissue microenvironment and decides whether its seeing self or something foreign and acts accordingly. Then, your own microbiome has to do something to avoid immune immune responses, as the immune system is only pre-trained using your own DNA. Then, let's assume your microbiome has to mimic (copy) some of your DNA to signal self to the immune system. And it turns out it is true [1]. Lots of bacteria mimic insulin. And when those bacteria end up being classified as non-self, you also destroy your pancreatic beta cells, which produce insulin. There's good evidence for lots of other diseases. For example, multiple sclerosis [2]. The first paper cites other diseases, including Alzheimer's that look like mis-classification induced by dysbiosis in the microbiome or an infection. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1 [2] https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/462/eaat4301 https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/10/462/eaat4301

datastoat 7y ago

What the linked article says: > In a sea of amyloid-focused grants, there are tiny islands of research on oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, and, especially, a protein called tau. The Wikipedia article you cite: > On examining her brain, he found senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles [which are made of tau protein -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofibrillary_tangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofibrillary_tangle] What you actually wrote: > In 1911, Alois Alzheimer found plaques in his dementia patient's brain. These plaques are what researchers would focus on for more than the next 100 years. You omitted the tangles and played up the plaques. It looks like you're part of the cabal!

svara 7y ago
You're right, I should have mentioned tau. But the viral link is the really big deal here that was overlooked for too long. > It looks like you're part of the cabal! I have no horse in this race ;) I only commented because the title seemed needlessly inflammatory to me. Everybody should just read the full article, like I wrote I think it's very good.
- JackFr 7y ago
  > the title seemed needlessly inflammatory In the end, it's always the inflammation...

leftyted 7y ago

> In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous. I think that narrative is correct. We can't fix the problem if we don't discuss it. The whole "I believe in science" thing (which you seem to be pushing) is really quite silly. Funding is a political game and the people who are best at politics tend to be the worst at research (and vice-versa). I think this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of scientists are hangers-on, i.e. not capable of doing original research. These scientists are terrified of people who can do original research since it makes them look bad (and feel bad, it's actually depressing to think about all the people out there who are way smarter than me). You can imagine funding schemes that attempt to account for these issues. "For every dollar of funding for interpretation A, earmark 25 cents for alternative interpretations". View science as a market, something beyond our powers to predict, then diversify your investments.

svara 7y ago
I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but I think the politics of the funding game just reflect a fundamental problem for which I don't see an obvious solution: Science has to be conservative, in order to protect the integrity of the record of published findings. This can lead to a situation where a field gets stuck in a local optimum from which progress is no longer possible, because things that don't seem to fit are dismissed as implausible. But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! At the end of the day, the question is: can we somehow induce these necessary paradigm shifts more quickly? I really don't know.
- btrettel 7y ago
  > But you can't fix that by funding implausible things, because most of these actually do come from people who don't know what they're talking about! I think this framing is inaccurate. The alternative ideas aren't necessarily less plausible. The process by which science is funded does not accurately determine plausibility in my view. It's heavily swayed by factors it should be independent of like fads or sounding good to the proposal evaluator (who may not be an expert in the field) but having deeper issues. To quote from a book I have about writing grant proposals: > [...] writing a grant application is unlike writing a scholarly manuscript for publication in a prestigious professional journal. In the former case, your target audience is likely to be 1) a reader who is not particularly knowledgeable in the area of your proposal (except in a very general sense); 2) an individual who is overworked, tired, hassled, and intent on getting through the required reading as quickly as possible; and 3) someone committed to reading your proposal only because he or she has to. From p. 31 of the 2014 edition of this: http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ http://www.grantcentral.com/workbooks/any-other-agency/ The status quo is not the best we can do.

dekhn 7y ago

"""feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous.""" This is precisely what modern science is (well, a major subset). The competition for grant funding and attention space is extremely intense. I agree there was no "alzheimer's cabal" but it's not uncommon in science for the prevailing mainstream position to (intentionally or otherwise) suppress alternative opinions ("extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence" is often used to maintain the status quo). One of the important issues is when an idea ends up dominating funding. If you have a legitimate alternative hypothesis but can't get the funding to run the experiments to provide that extraordinary evidence, you'll fail to convince people. The people who get the most funding are the ones who are the most competitive, not the smartest, or the rightest.

dccoolgai 7y ago
Interesting... Are there any current issues you can think of in academia where disagreeing with the prevailing opinion can make one a pariah... Even, perhaps, assigned an epithet like "denier"? I think whenever this happens in academia/science, it is incredibly dangerous. Proper science invites and celebrates denial - seeks to deconstruct it and understand it to be more certain of the truth. The mere presence of any other attitude is a strong smell that something is drastically wrong.
- dekhn 7y ago
  It's not relevant today but a well-known virologist, Peter Duesberg, was an HIV-causes-AIDS denialist (before that he was very well known for real accomplishments in virology). However, he never showed any evidence to support his case and there was extensive evidence against it. If you want to be a denier, the reality is that you have to show a lot of compelling evidence both supporting your position, and against the mainstream position. Modern denialism tends to be more centered around climate change- whether it is occurring, and what the impacts will be in the near and long term, and how to respond. Many physics people (who worked on high energy particle physics, etc) have looked at the claims from the various climate change promoters and found the source evidence to be less than convincing. If they articulate this, they are often described as denialists. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer

amw 7y ago

I agree that the title is pure clickbait, I disagree that the article completely divorces itself from the premise the title implies. This whole thing where science journalism drums up this huge controversy after the fact when enough science on a topic has been performed to think that maybe a particular explanation is a bad one is a symptom of organizations that have to drum up a saucy narrative to sell. It is perfectly natural to fund science that seems like a good idea at the time, and not fund ideas that seem less plausible than the prevailing explanation, and while it does suck that it takes a while to overturn the idea that the idea is good, representing our 20/20 hindsight as some irredeemable inertia with conspiracist overtones is a big problem.

volkse 7y ago
The title isn’t “pure clickbait” although a little hyperbolic. I worked in a research laboratory in a top medical school in the US. The professor in charge of the lab was an amyloid sceptic, and the existence of this sort of “cabal” was apparent, at least to him. Words like “delusional” were thrown around. This was 7 years ago! Also, considering the actual harm caused, i don’t think you can be hyperbolic enough about this issue..

shakil 7y ago

See this other link for the case of a Colombian woman whose brain is full of the amyloid plaque but she is dementia free due to a genetic mutation. The biggest difference between her and the rest of her family that suffer from Alzheimer's is the fact that tau buildup is minimal in her brain. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/colombian-woman-s-genes-offer-new-clues-staving-alzheimer-s https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/colombian-woman-s-ge...

dang 7y ago

What's a better title? We can change it. Better = more accurate and neutral, using representative language from the article.

hitekker 7y ago
How about "Collusion" instead of "Cabal"? Wikipedia defines collusion as "a secret cooperation or deceitful agreement in order to deceive others, although not necessarily illegal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion
- mcguire 7y ago
  You'd have to demonstrate 'deceit' and 'cooperation'.
- dang 7y ago
  The word 'collusion' doesn't appear in the article and has its own triggering capacities these days. Best not to go there.
mirimir 7y ago
How about "The beta-amyloid paradigm thwarted progress toward an Alzheimer’s cure"?
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, we'll use something like that. Thanks! Edit: I've changed it back because readers are divided on this.
- hitekker 7y ago
  I disagree. The article articulates a political problem, not an error in reasoning. These few scientists did not just choose a stable approach that later turned out to be wrong: they doubled-down, tripled-down on a shakey guess for decades and suppressed voices to the contrary. The seemingly credentialed, respected, and authoritative experts of Alzheimer's sabotaged the science around a hot-button problem for their own personal gain, while society suffered the consequences. This antipattern can be seen as a kind of "academic rent-seeking" or "false-expertise". It can also be called "collusion" given that an organized group of people semi-intentionally marginalized their opposition at the outset, and at great cost to the broader public.

el_cujo 7y ago

>In this day and age, feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous. >Reality is much more nuanced, and the article actually does a good job of detailing that. It's bad to sow too much mistrust in science, sure, but it certainly feels like society right now is way too far in the opposite direction right now, with people blindly believing any headline following the phrase "a new study says..." or "scientists say...". A lot of scientific fields are very competitive for funding right now, there is immense pressure to twist every result into a "win" while equally important null results ("we tried X and surprisingly it did not worked") are basically treated as worthless. People shouldn't blindly mistrust science, but blind trust is just as dangerous, the system right now is far from perfect. I believe most researchers still ultimately want to solve mysteries in nature and improve life, but they're also human beings who ultimately want to be able to keep working and provide for themselves and their families, these two motivations are not always perfectly aligned.