How Not to Study a Disease
"For decades, some of our best and brightest medical scientists have dedicated themselves to finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease. What happened? Where is the cure? The biggest breakthroughs occurred twenty-five years ago, with little progress since. In How Not to Study a Disease, neurobiologist Karl Herrup explains why the Alzheimer's discoveries of the 1990s didn't bear fruit and maps a direction for future research. Herrup describes the research, explains what's taking so long, and offers an approach for research in the future"--Book jacket flap. "A trade book on Alzheimer's disease - its human face, some insights into its biology, the discoveries that seemed a path to prevention if not cure, 25 years without progress, and a new path forward"
Stats for nerds
2recommend
8mentions
3people
2023–2026years
88% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The major problem has been lock-in of the Abeta 42 peptide fragment as the cause. This monomaniacal focus was rewarded by grant awards to team players.
Karl Herrup has a terrific book on the topic How Not to Study a Disease — The Story of Alzheimer’s from MIT Press (2021, ISBN 9780262045902). He did not win many friends but I think he is right.
The consensus now is that many factors contribute to the heterogeneous diseases we now call Alzheimer’s.
- Many in the research community realised the model was wrong a long time ago. This is a great read about the reasons why: 'How not to study a disease: the story of Alzheimer’s.' by Karl Herrup.
- Yes, I share some of your concerns about groupthink and research cliques. The best and balanced critique is Karl Herrup’s book at MIT Press: “How Not To Study a Disease”.
Your comment is over the top with respect to NIH-funded researchers doing Alzheimer’s research. The emotion would be entirely appropriate if directed at RJ Reynolds Inc. and other cigarette companies or Purdue Pharma. Those are evil companies that many governments have tolerated killing for profit—Purdue Pharma and the OxyContin disaster alone about 500,000 Americans over 20 years; and US tobacco companies contribute to about as many excess deaths per year.
The systematic image manipulation by a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Sylvain Lesné, was egregious and worthy of jail time but he was a truly exceptional case and polluted 20 or more papers that did distract the entire field. You can read all about it here.
PMID: 35862524 Piller C. Blots on a field? Science. 2022 377:358-363. doi: 10.1126/science.add9993
- Great and highly critical book on this general topic: “How Not to Study a Disease” by Karl Herrup from MIT Press:
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5216/How-Not-to-Study-a-Di...
The core problem is much older than stated in this focused review.
- You might enjoy “How Not To Study A Disease: The Story of Alzheimer’s” by Karl Herrup (2023, MIT Press). Great sad overview of the hegemony of the Abeta hypothesis that now has a Tau hypothesis buddy.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546010/how-not-to-study-a-di...
- Is it time for periodic AI-driven audits of papers. Some types of audits may be easy—Western blots for example. But many edge cases will require lots of sleuthing or preferably open access to all files and data. Obviously paying for your own audit sets up the incentives the wrong way.
Alzheimer’s research has been a mess for 30 years as Karl Herrup argues persuasively in How Not to Study a Disease:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546010/how-not-to-study-a-di...
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