I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers.

I have read also PR by a university that claimed about breakthrough because one guy in a phase III clinical trial have reacted extremely well to the drug. The trial was globally a success, but no other of the ~400 patients reacted so well, for most of them the disease progression was more or less stopped but not cured.

In 2023 alone, more than 17,000 papers were published on Alzheimer's disease. The immense majority of these publications are about (complex) factoids that are useless to humanity. Yet their university will claim that each of them is a breakthrough. Most authors will publish only one paper on this subject and jump to an unrelated subject in the next paper.

A shred of evidence is the ratio of proposed drugs by academics and the drugs that can enter a phase III clinical trial as they have shown some efficacy. It's something like 1000 to 1.

The largest problem for leaders is how to organize research. There is a consensus that goals-oriented research is not the most efficient way to achieve great results. Instead, we have a free market and a star system. Most academics are free to work on whatever they want.

I can't think of a solution out of those two obviously broken policies.