> 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.
> 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?
Part 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.
The 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.
> 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.