14 ms·
Researchers to retract landmark Alzheimer's paper containing doctored images
- instagraham 2y ago> Neuroscientist Karen Ashe plans to retract her team’s landmark Alzheimer’s paper after acknowledging that it contains manipulated images. The 2006 study, which suggested that the disease could be caused by an amyloid beta protein, has been cited nearly 2,500 times. “I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on the discussion site PubPeer, adding that she stands by the paper’s conclusions. > Scientists are divided over whether the problems with the paper undermine the dominant, yet controversial, theory that beta-amyloid plaques are a root cause of Alzheimer’s disease.
- GenerWork 2y ago> Scientists are divided over whether the problems with the paper undermine the dominant, yet controversial, theory that beta-amyloid plaques are a root cause of Alzheimer’s disease. How could it not at least be a wake up call that studies that use this paper as a base could be fundamentally flawed?
- fbdab103 2y agoPart of the problem is that studying the brain is hard. We have lots of in vitro or mouse models that tell a story, but nothing is conclusive. There have been many orthogonal studies which can replicate some of the associations, but nothing that can precisely point out underlying cause and effect. Yet people are suffering today, so researchers are following the best leads we have.
- desert_rue 2y agoThe best leads we have are faked images? I get that it is complicated but fraud in one area (images) makes the hard data extremely suspect.
- mbreese 2y agoThe problem is that the altered images represent a still plausible theory. There is a reason why they were believed in the first place. It isn’t that these false images are negative evidence. Instead, they don’t help or refute the underlying hypothesis at all. The real question (that I’m not sure about) is if anyone else has been able for replicate the original experiment.
- fbdab103 2y agoThere have been many subsequent studies which generate evidence in support of the underlying idea. As they say, it only takes one result to disprove a theory, but nobody has been able to do so to date.
- next_xibalba 2y agoKaren Ashe attended Harvard for both her undergrad and MD. With all the academic fraud committed by Harvard connected people that has come to light in the past few years, one really has to wonder what is up with that institution (and higher ed more generally).
- passwordoops 2y agoHarvard makes the news. Sadly it happens everywhere [1] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8 (apologies of you don't have access to Nature)
- readthenotes1 2y agoIt was her "protégé", Sylvain Lesné, that did the dirty work. And apparently has been rewarded with continuing employment. Perhaps it was Ashe's Harvard education that led her to not consider double-checking the work... Edit to add: iirc, it was the University of Minnesota that is also responsible for the "food fat is bad" advice that has made obesity than American epidemic...
- garciasn 2y agoIt was Harvard. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
- monero-xmr 2y agoHarvard wants academic celebrities. It's not enough to do solid work, you need awards, plaudits, research that punches through the noise, articles in the mainstream press, and so on. Harvard is a brand first and foremost. If what you want most in life is to be a tenured Harvard professor in your chosen field, you need to publish research that makes a big splash. The most surefire way to do this was to simply commit fraud rather than conduct experiments and pray you get lucky and find an outlier result worthy of significant rewards. We are witnessing the fallout now as people no longer assume honesty and integrity, and begin to analyze the actual papers for accuracy.
- OutOfHere 2y ago[flagged]
- melling 2y agoI thought we didn’t know the cause of Alzheimer’s when it’s not genetic.
- throwaway81523 2y agoIt's not known but among other things there is some evidence that it comes from a viral infection earlier in life. Multiple sclerosis is another thing like that. https://www.science.org/content/article/study-links-viral-infections-alzheimer-s-parkinson-s-many-caveats https://www.science.org/content/article/study-links-viral-in...
- OutOfHere 2y agoA healthy immune system will keep most viruses in check, but a metabolic mess ultimately becomes an immunologic mess too, leading to brain disease.
- yxwvut 2y agoThe world must be so tidy for you. Who needs actual science when we have your facile hunches?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- OutOfHere 2y ago[flagged]
- jcrites 2y agoPlease consider presenting the evidence without the personal swipes, and please consider reviewing the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Your comments in this thread would be more constructive without the swipes.
- kristianp 2y ago> published in Nature in 2006 So around 18 years ago. That’s a long time for researchers that believed in this papar's conclusions to be going down the wrong rabbit hole. What a huge waste of effort and the lives of those with Alzheimer's.
- wang_li 2y agoThis kind of fraud should carry a prison sentence.
- datahack 2y agoAbsolutely. It’s not just a bad path, it’s taken researchers down a road that robbed approaches that could have helped people of resources because they lied.
- hangonhn 2y agoI wonder what the effects on retractions would be though. Some researchers might go down fighting or refuse to cooperate with investigators.
- docbrown 2y agoRetracted and sham papers is actually a major problem. Estimated 10,000 papers were retracted in 2023 (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situatio...) and that is thought to be only a small percentage.
- rowanG077 2y agoThat's kinda misleading. Not every retracted paper contains doctored results. There just a ton of mistakes as well.
- eviks 2y agothis isn't a big deal since no one reads most of those papers, it's mostly invisible sacrifice to the metrics gods. Very prominent papers like the one discussed, on the other hand, have much bigger consequences
- bhk 2y agoI'm amazed at how this one specific easily detectable type of fraud is so common. One has to wonder about all the other, less obvious, ways of comitting fraud and how common they must be.
- BurningFrog 2y agoWas it as easily detectable in 2006?
- mike_hearn 2y agoSure. They're not using advanced ML to find these. Just visual inspection and the kind of transforms you could do in Photoshop in 1991.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoThis is why you're going to see an explosion of fraud cases stemming from the 90s and early-to-mid 00s. That was the period where PCs were widespread so it was pretty easy to copy words and images, but actually looking at any individual set of words or images and asking "Were these copied from somewhere?" was much more difficult. A lot of people copied/manipulated then because they thought it would be too hard to catch them. Well, technology caught up. Just look at the multiple plagiarism cases against the former Harvard president. It was clear, at least to me, she copied liberally more out of laziness/lack of confidence because she didn't think she would get caught for small phrases here and there. I mean, who goes through all of the trouble to write a dissertation and then plagiarizes the acknowledgements???
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoIn the Claudine Gay case, she didn't actually steal anyone's work in any of the publicized examples I saw. She clearly attributed the ideas and statements she was using, but then sometimes proceeded to paraphrase them too closely, without using quotation marks. You could argue that it's technically plagiarism, but morally, it isn't. The reason she got nailed was because billionaire donors were upset that she wasn't cracking down on pro-Palestinian student protesters. Ironically, the guy who led the charge against Gay, Bill Ackman, is married to a celebrity academic who committed real, bona fide plagiarism. Once that came out, Ackman suddenly had all sorts of excuses for his wife's actual misconduct, which makes it clear that he never actually cared about the issue of plagiarism. He just wants kids who protest against the war in Gaza to get expelled.
- bagels 2y agoElisabeth Bik has a twitter where, at least in the past, she exposed a bunch of questionable things in papers (lots of manipulated images or images copied from other papers) https://x.com/MicrobiomDigest https://x.com/MicrobiomDigest https://x.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/902016709019672577 https://x.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/902016709019672577 These efforts are just going to accelerate with AI applied, new and exciting frauds will be discovered.
- etrautmann 2y agoYes, but AI tools also make it easier for bad actors to generate false images that are harder to detect as false going forward. The ones that get caught now seem to be incredibly simplistic manipulations.
- blindriver 2y agoI know 2 people including my own mother who died of Alzheimer's and one who has it right now. Who knows where would we be right now if we didn't go on the wrong track with this fraudulent paper? Things like this is why trust in scientists are at an all-time low. There's corruption at every single layer of our society and I don't know what we can do to get honor and honesty back as top moral goals for citizens. This amyloid theory has been completely debunked at this point but has wasted almost two decades of progress because of it. It's so infuriating, but I don't see this stopping because there's no accountability.
- OutOfHere 2y agoEveryone in power is in on it for revenue maximization. Treating someone at an early stage is never the goal; making money and winning awards is the goal. The FDA is 100% in on it.
- pvaldes 2y ago> Treating someone at an early stage is never the goal This claim is just an opinion. I bet that if we check the real statistics there are lots of cases that show exactly the opposite behavior. > making money and winning awards is the goal We should remind that making money and winning awards are perfectly legit goals, as long as the work is done honestly. Working with Alzheimer patients rank probably among some of the most emotionally hardest and more depressive works that I could imagine. We should stop treating scientists as missionary figures that were born to save all of us for free.
- OutOfHere 2y agoThose who don't even see the problem are already corrupted. Early stage treatments at scale can be very possible with cheap preventative bloodwork and inexpensive small molecules. Instead, we have no diagnostics until it's already too late, and then we have 50K/year "treatments" that don't even work. The ones you referred to are not scientists; they're scientific mercenaries.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
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- BenFranklin100 2y agoIf one wants less fraud change incentives. 1. Grants and faculty positions should be less dependent on number of publications, and more on the quality of publications. 2. Place more emphasis on basic research and less on translational research. The latter encourages hyperbole and p-hacking. In the late 90s, the NIH initiated a strong emphasis that all research should have an immediate practical value. This is not reasonable and as a result, researchers grossly exaggerate the impact of their work, and some even engage in an outright fraud.
- nradov 2y agoHow do we measure quality of publications? I know there have been attempts to do so based on journal impact factor and quantity of citations but those metrics are also manipulated.
- desert_rue 2y agoI know we would have to change a lot from how it is set up today, but here are some ideas: - How many times has the results been reproduced by others? - Add another layer of blindness: the person doing the lab work is not the person crunching the results. It could even be where two different groups crunch the numbers, and all groups are unknown to the others. - Avoid p hacking with pre determined (and registered!) p values - Register the experiment with hypothesis before the start of the experiment - Register authors as they are added and removed, and have that history be publicly available - All results have to be uploaded to a website before publication - The method of calculation has to be public on a website before publication. So a high quality paper is one where - the experiment was logged in advance - the history of authors is known - there is a distinct separation of experimenter and cruncher - the public can get the results themselves and run the same analysis to confirm (or not!) the results - the experiment is repeated and confirmed by others. Even if the first experiment is bad or a fraud, and the second one doesn’t confirm it, a third experiment could be the tie breaker. It would be more traceable to understand if it was the lab or the cruncher that made a mistake or was committing fraud. Overall, we have to incentivize good science.
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- abpavel 2y ago[flagged]
- sterlind 2y agoThese and your past few posts are obviously ChatGPT, but you posted something real only an hour ago, and your account is years old. So what's the deal? Why are you doing this?
- imperfect_light 2y agoChatGPT agrees, "The likelihood that this was written by a chatbot is relatively high"
- elefanten 2y ago> Lesné, who did not reply to requests for comment, remains a UMN professor and receives National Institutes of Health funding. The university has been investigating his work since June 2022. A spokesperson says UMN recently told Nature it had reviewed two images in question, and “has closed this review with no findings of research misconduct pertaining to these figures.” The statement did not reference several other questioned figures in the same paper. UMN did not comment on whether it had reached conclusions about other Lesné papers with apparently doctored images. Horrifying. 2 years investigating and they’ve commented on two images?
- mike_hearn 2y agoIt's standard. Universities always drag these things out for years, and often acquit either without explanation or with an explanation like "this unfortunate event was caused merely by enormous incompetence", even when that can't possibly be true. Universities cannot/will not investigate their own staff properly.
- LgWoodenBadger 2y agoNo one (institutional or human), anywhere, can investigate themselves competently. It should never be acceptable.
- jl6 2y agoThis article contains the actual alleged doctored images: https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...
- DeathArrow 2y agoToo late, the tens of thousands of papers citing this paper and drawing conclusions based on it won't be retracted. Nor would be retracted papers based on papers based on this paper.
- midtake 2y agoThere should be some sort of "taint" checking that will indicate how many retracted papers any given one is based on. It shouldn't be too difficult since publications are highly structured. With LLMs we can read all the papers at once and flag the most strongly derived for further review.
- jcranmer 2y agoIt's dubious that a lot of the papers citing this paper are actually drawing conclusions based on this paper. Per Derek Lowe [1]: > I could be wrong about this, but from this vantage point the original Lesné paper and its numerous follow-ups have largely just given people in the field something to point at when asked about the evidence for amyloid oligomers directly affecting memory. [...] The expressions in the literature about the failure to find *56 (as in the Selkoe lab’s papers) did not de-validate the general idea for anyone - indeed, Selkoe’s lab has been working on amyloid oligomers the whole time and continues to do so. [1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid...
- dekhn 2y agoIt's interesting that Lowe said this: >When I review a paper, I freely admit that I am generally not thinking “What if all of this is based on lies and fakery?” It’s not the way that we tend to approach scientific manuscripts. Rather, you ask whether the hypothesis is a sound one and if it was tested in a useful way: were the procedures used sufficient to trust the results and were these results good enough to draw conclusions that can in turn be built upon by further research? I have, over time, come to treat every paper I read as being based on lies and fakery (or incompetence, unconscious bias, or intentional omission of key details), and I work to convince myself that the paper is not fradulent or false. That is, my null hypothesis is that published work is wrong. After chattiing with many people about this, I've found that most people default ot believing a paper is right and if the figures and conclusion agree with their bias, they just move on, beliving the paper to be true. I've been guilty of this in the past as well.
- seydor 2y agoPeople have been using these mice as mouse model of alzheimer's for decades, so there must be something here. It's not like the whole research direction was "wrong"
- gnicholas 2y agoThere's a strong incentive to get a high citation count for your papers. This encourages behavior like the manipulations we're seeing here, on the part of fraudsters. But it also fails to incentivize caution on the part of researchers who cite existing works. If there were a "bamboozled count" that showed how many times a researcher cited a work that was later retracted, that would incentivize people to be a little more cautious, and perhaps avoid citing work of people who are suspected to be fudging the numbers.
- graemep 2y agoMaking the system more elaborate would also make it more complex, and people would just find more complex ways to game it. it might even make things worse. I am sure most citations are not by people who suspected the numbers were fudged. If anything, the way to go is to stop using flawed metrics. Most people want to do a good job and build a good reputation. Incentives just distort this.
- F-Lexx 2y agoWhile we're at it, let's also add a "rickrolled counter" for people who open the link and close it in less than 10 seconda. That should incentivize people to be a little more cautious, and perhaps avoid clicking on links without first doublechecking the URL.
- gnicholas 2y agoThis is basically the academic version of that.
- phromo 2y agoOne red flag should be that nowhere in this news article is the reader made aware of the exact nature of the manipulated images or their implications. If you go to the linked pubpeer review page you'll find why -- it's much less dramatic and all the findings were also replicated following this inquiry to show that any image alteration, that might have been made for editorial purposes, does not affect conclusions.... Drama drama drama, feed the people more drama... sigh
- el_cujo 2y ago>One red flag should be that nowhere in this news article is the reader made aware of the exact nature of the manipulated images or their implications. Because that was covered in detail when the manipulations were first reported and those articles are linked to in the above article. This is just reporting on the resulting retraction two years after that initial report. >it's much less dramatic and all the findings were also replicated following this inquiry to show that any image alteration, that might have been made for editorial purposes, does not affect conclusions Other groups had issues replicating the results with the same oligomer (often just chalked up to its instability), it's not like someone just happened to stumble upon these manipulations casually. This retraction only happened because Nature rejected the author's attempt to publish a correction. This whole thing is a black mark on Nature's record as well so if it really was just some minor change to make a picture look prettier for publishing purposes, I doubt they would have insisted on this action
- oefrha 2y ago“All the findings were replicated” is a claim by the accused, which is disputed by the researcher who originally found the issues, and he detailed all the contradicting claims right in that thread https://pubpeer.com/publications/8FF7E6996524B73ACB4A9EF5C0AACF#19 https://pubpeer.com/publications/8FF7E6996524B73ACB4A9EF5C0A.... Image alteration “that might have been made for editorial purposes” is a laughable euphemism for fraud, even the accused didn’t dare to use that phrasing. Not sure what’s in it for you to seriously misrepresent scientific fraud.
- dekhn 2y agoI disagree with this assessment. If Bik sees "shockingly blatant" copying, it's almost certain the author (or one of the authors) specifically, with intent, committed fraud. The other main explanation is incompetence (it's not impossible to misattribute a specific figure if your data handling is poor).
- zxxh 2y agoI actually know one of the guys who faked this data from a young age. He was basically losing his mind because of rage issues due to his extreme phobia of being poor/ falling into poverty. It’s interesting to me how these companies basically played into his fear of losing his funding to push this BS.
- eigenvalue 2y agoThis person Lesné shouldn’t have a job at a university after this. In fact, I strongly believe this person should be behind bars for having swindled the government and tax payers out of many millions of dollars in wasted grant money. The incentives for perpetuating this kind of fraudulent research have to be utterly devastating to those who do it to even hope for a deterrence against future malfeasance.
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- therobots927 2y agoThey should be sent to prison for this, as should all fraudulent researchers big and small.
- oneepic 2y agoI may be alone in this, but I think these threats like jailtime for fraudulent research would have the side effect of discouraging researchers that don't even engage in that stuff. I think pulling out the pitchforks is a misguided idea, and it's a shame that it's so common today. On one hand, these people have a big responsibility to do good work and stay out of trouble for the sake of the ones they're helping (i.e. Alzheimer's patients), but on the other hand their impact depends a lot on their mental/emotional state -- if you put more bs in their mental buffer, it's naturally going to mess with them and lead to a decline in quality. They have to focus.
- therobots927 2y agoDoes that same reasoning apply to people who work in finance or accounting? Distrust in science is at an all time high and these frauds cause incalculable damage to scientific integrity. They are literally poisoning the well of human knowledge. That should be considered a high crime.
- canadiantim 2y agoI still firmly believe a large portion of alzheimer cases are due to candida or other forms of gut dysbiosis, leading to the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier. Candida then enters the brain and the glial cells break down the candida producing amyloid plaques. But the root cause is from the gut.
- theGnuMe 2y agoThe microbiome is significant. Could it not also be olfactory?
- canadiantim 2y agoOlfactory in what way? I think toxins could definitely get in by breathing it in, e.g. like mold, which is a generally underestimated, but in my opinion significant source of complex chronic conditions. So for sure those are possibilities too. I suspect alzheimers (which is a subset of dementia), is a cluster of diseases similar to cancer. I think a large subset is due to candida, but I wouldn't be surprised if mold and other environmental toxins cause other subsets.
- closetkantian 2y ago[flagged]
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- waveywaves 2y agoI have been reading Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia. I believe this research is used in the book to talk about Alzheimer's. I'm guessing the book will have to be revised. Gonna have to check in the acknowledgements of the book now.
- waveywaves 2y agoThis paper is not cited in the book thankfully.