What’s the Deal With Alzheimer’s Disease and Amyloid?

Beege Welborn

The very last section of the article has some significance for all of the scientific community and the current state of the public's general disgust with them, but I'm not sure the author realizes the case he's made, justifying it.

...We would almost certainly know a lot more about those other potential causes had it not been for the so-called Amyloid Mafia. Scientists aren’t immune to groupthink, and the people responsible for deciding who got research grants and who didn’t have not been at all receptive to proposals that investigate non-amyloid mechanisms.

“You were just lucky when you weren’t beaten up by the amyloid-β or tau people if you would mention immunology,” said Michael Heneka, a neuroinflammation specialist interviewed by Nature in 2023. (Tau is another Alzheimer ’s-associated protein.)

Speaking to American Public Media, the former director of Alzheimer’s research at the National Institute of Aging said, “It became gradually an infallible belief system. So everybody felt obligated to pay homage to the idea without questioning. And that’s not very healthy for science when scientists… accept an idea as infallible. That’s when you run into problems.”

To make matters worse, it turned out that much of that confidence in amyloid-β as the one true cause was built on fake data.

Golly. 

If that doesn't sound the teensiest bit familiar...