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Annelie Geissler

DOCTORED

Charles Piller

Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's

A riveting work of nonfiction from journalist Charles Piller, exposing the series of calculated actions, fabrications and forgeries that may have set back Alzheimer's research by decades.
Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease, a tragedy that is already projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Charles Piller's Doctored shows that we've quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all alongled astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.

Piller begins with a whistleblower, Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag, whose work exposed a massive scandal. Schrag found that a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist and a Nobel Prize-rumored director delivered apparently falsified data at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease. Piller's revelations of Schrag's findings stunned the field and the public.

From there, based on years of investigative reporting, Doctored exposes a vast network of deceit and its players, all the way up to the FDA. Piller uncovers evidence that hundreds of important Alzheimer's research papers are based on false data. In the process, he reveals how even against a flood of money and influence, a determined cadre of scientific renegades have fought back to challenge the field's institutional powers in service to science and the tens of thousands of patients who have been drawn into trials to test dubious drugs. It is a shocking tale with huge ramifications not only for Alzheimer's disease, but for scientific research, funding, and oversight at large.

Charles Piller is an Investigative Correspondent for Science, one of the world's preeminent scholarly journals, and has received more than 35 honors from a wide variety of awarding bodies. His work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize nine times by STAT, the Los Angeles Times, and The Sacramento Bee. He is the author of two previous books: The Fail-Safe Society: Community Defiance and the End of American Technological Optimism (Basic Books) and Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technologies (with Keith R. Yamamoto; Beech Tree Books).
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Published 2025-02-04 by Atria/ One Signal Publishers

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Published 2023-05-29 by One Signal/ Simon & Schuster

Comments

A beautifully told, shocking story of the destructive effects that individual ambition and dishonesty have had on the entire field of Alzheimer's research. Through diligent and intelligent journalism, Piller has done an enormous service in detailing both the extent of fraudulent Alzheimer's research and the troubling inability of the research community to deal with Science fabricators and their contamination of widely-held beliefs.

Doctored meticulously reveals a world of scientific fraud, its unsuspecting victims, and the sleuths and heroes fighting to fix it. This should be required reading for aspiring scientists, policymakers, and anyone who will one day be touched by a devastating disease which is all of us.

Charles Piller has received more than 40 honors/awards including two major journalist awards from the National Institute on Health Care Management and the National Academies of Sciences/Schmidt Futures Foundation. His work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize nine times by STAT, the Los Angeles Times, and The Sacramento Bee.

Piller's narrative reads like a noirish detective story, complete with tense conversations with scientists who seem to be working an angle rather than facing facts ("The reason you are here is that I've forgiven you," says one researcher whose fraudulent work Piller exposed in Science). It's a troubling look at the corruption of Big Science.

America's Johnson & Johnson Problem: A new book reveals how Big Pharma's brazen behavior fueled medical mistrust. Read more...

A fast-paced ride through a web of scientific misconduct in Alzheimer's research that has wasted billions of dollars and misled the public.

Piller's groundbreaking 2022 Science magazine article Blots on a Field : A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer's articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease immediately generated a global storm for the field of Alzheimer's research, with hundreds of media outlets making it headline news on every continent, including intensive coverage in the US, UK, China, and Europe. The Sunday Times called Piller's reporting a "bombshell investigation that detonated at the heart of the multibillion-dollar race to develop a breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer's and dementia." Read more...

A riveting must-read master class in science journalism. For those of us who want to 'trust the science,' Doctored is the necessary reminder that trust has to be earned.

Doctored is a riveting, deeply researched journalistic investigation. Piller leaves you glued to the page as you discover how hubris, greed and negligence collide in the quest of a cure for Alzheimers. It's the story of a courageous whistleblower, Matthew Schrag, who risks everything by exposing the truth, and the institutions universities, regulators, academic journals who fail to uphold academic integrity. A shocking tale about medicine, and the amyloid hypothesis in particular, this investigation is a must-read for researchers, students, policymakers, and everybody who wants to truly understand how science is made and unmade.

Doctored masterfully unfolds an epic tale of astounding fraud, scientific egos run amok, and steely heroism in the pursuit of truth, creating both a page turner and a seminal account of deceit that will long be remembered alongside Theranos and Enron as a scandal for the ages.