What if one of the leading contemporary Alzheimer’s studies turns out to be a fraud? What if hundreds of articles published in the last 15 years had to be removed because they had “shockingly obvious” issues? This is what Science magazine denounced a few days ago and, as usual, caused an earthquake in the world of biomedical research.

What happened? In August 2021, an attorney contacted Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, as he was working on specific doubts about documents used by a pharmaceutical company, Cassava Sciences, to seek approval of an Alzheimer’s drug. Of course, Schrag came across a huge catalog of seemingly fake images. Thus began a chain reaction that not only triggered all the alarms in the research world, but also affected one of the key papers of modern research on the disease.

a house of cards. The study, published in Nature in 2006, was considered “irrefutable proof” that Aβ plaques, known as plaques in brain tissue, are the main cause of the disease. We’re talking about the main current working hypothesis on Alzheimer’s, and if Schrag were right, there would be an earthquake in the research field.

The conditional is important because Schrag’s work mainly focuses on addressing the apparent problems of the images of dozens of works considered classic in the field. However, he is not a ‘judge’ and did not delve into the review editorial processes: in the Science article, he realized that there may be explanations for some of these problems and did not seek to draw “final conclusions”, the truth is that “the data should speak for itself”.

And so there is: Science research, based on independent researchers, seems to confirm that there are hundreds of images (some of them “shockingly obvious”) in question. It is too early to draw conclusions (as there are now dozens of journals examining the evidence, seeking clarification and deciding whether to withdraw articles); however, ‘Nature’ has started to examine some studies and everything points to a new ‘replication crisis’ approaching.

What effects does it have? Beyond economic waste and professional problems, the most obvious would be a waste of time. Since 2006, hundreds of people have used these experiments as a starting point for their own experiments, research, and development of new drugs. If all this evidence collapses like a house of paper, we will have to start from scratch in many areas.

a new science. The last decade has been almost a century for contemporary science. The replication crises that affect the psychology and biology of cancer have become much deeper and more widespread than previously thought, and today there is hardly a field of science that is not affected by these problems in one way or another. Which of these weeks in biomedical research is an earthquake, yes; but above all it reminds us that we need better ways to organize contemporary science and undo perverse incentives: our lives (and health) depend on it.

Image | National Cancer Institute