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Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

Scientists like Sylvain Lesné whose alleged misconduct cost us over a decade investigating a dead end hypothesis should face substantial prison time. Considerable people have faced the horror of this disease with no hope for a cure in sight because charlatans like this likely manipulated data in the name of making their own careers.

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There is an incredibly valuable and interesting comment ranked below yours that gives enormous amounts of context on the Amyloid hypothesis and the state of the field. I don’t have the power to make that the top-ranked comment and all the “we need to punish” comments lower ranked. But I do wish the posters and other readers on HN would help to make that happen.

I read the comment you refer to, and it does have a lot of useful context. That said (and here I'm quoting a reply to that comment), the commenter claims that Lesné was "not that highly cited", though his main fraudulent paper was cited 2,300 times, making it the fifth most highly cited Alzheimer's paper since 2006. That seems bogus on its face.

Separately, I think it's legitimate for calls for scientific fraudsters to go to jail to rise to the top. There's no contradiction between wanting this, and wanting a more nuanced understanding of the field.

Yes, it is bogus on its face, I was wrong. I also accidentally miswrote that tau might lead to amyloid beta aggregation, when the "both matter" hypothesis usually argues the opposite relationship. I misspelled Eliezer Masliah's name, I didn't qualify that those are the big three scandals I'm aware of, I'm sure there's more. Thanks for forum peer review, don't take everything I say 100 percent, I will be bothering people senior than me to comment on this more broadly and with editing in more official forums, though, because what this tells me is that we are not keeping the public sufficiently informed on the state of the field, challenges, and current research directions.

Responses like this remind me in moments of doubt that science has still got it.

Thank you.

My mother has Alzheimer's, so this matters a lot to me, both for her and myself and my kids in the future.

It has never felt reasonable to me that a small number of papers (highly cited or not) from 2006 could somehow be responsible for our failure to cure this disease over the past decades. It seems so emotionally tempting to give people a scapegoat that it frankly rings all my "too good to be true" alarm bells. And bluntly, it's just implausible.

Like it or not: if we're going to get a cure for this horrible disease, it's going to come out of the scientific community. My fear is that a bunch of non-experts are going to barge in with a weakly-understood idea about what is happening in the field, demand "reforms" with implications they don't understand, and in the process doom millions of people to agony and suffering.

thank you for mentioning this comment, it was very in depth and I agree I think it should be ranked higher

There should be some laws that were broken. Fraud in order to obtain research grants, fraud in order to maintain labs, etc etc.

In my mind this very much depends on who was tricked here. If the research was funded by companies, then arguably they should just have better oversight and the loss of their investment is already "punishment" to incentivice that better oversight. If it was public money, then it depends more on the nature of the fraud. I could concieve of a circumstance where I would also argue for a lapse in oversight and therefore a sort of "diffusion" of the responsibility.

I don't think it's certain that anything illegal happened here. It was certainly wrong, but wrong how?

>If the research was funded by companies, then arguably they should just have better oversight and the loss of their investment is already "punishment" to incentivice that better oversight.

This is not at all how the law works. You can't fool investors on purpose then shrug it off as "I win, they should have done their due diligence and second-guessed every aspect of my work that I intentionally falsified" lol. What you're arguing for is equivalent to a diffusion of responsibility for accounting fraud, as if the victims deserve it because auditors didn't detect it immediately.

I don't know the whole story but deceptive practices (deliberate wrongdoing) need to be punished, if that is what happened here.

I should point out that I'm my reply is not interested in what is likely to happen, but rather what I believe should happen.

We have plenty of cases where people have in fact been allowed to fool investors without repercussions. Most famously was the recent collapse of we work. There is in general quite a bit of leeway in the private markets to get creative about how you market your financial products. The public market is of course totally different, and that's also what I'm hinting at in my distinction.

I don't think it makes sense for a public entity to audit things that the public can't buy. Private financial institutions are (or at least should be) competent to audit their own investments. The general public are not competent to audit their own investments, and even if they were it would be extremely inefficient, so we should probably have some government entity for that.

>We have plenty of cases where people have in fact been allowed to fool investors without repercussions. Most famously was the recent collapse of we work. There is in general quite a bit of leeway in the private markets to get creative about how you market your financial products.

WeWork is a strange case because it relied on creating a market for office space, or else taking market share away from other modes of using office space. You can't look at it on the surface and say it's a terrible business model. That means, any claim against them would need to be quantitative in nature. Also, this deception is forward-looking: you can only claim it was wrong after some time has passed. If they falsified their tenancy numbers (past observables) then that would be more damning.

>I don't think it makes sense for a public entity to audit things that the public can't buy. Private financial institutions are (or at least should be) competent to audit their own investments.

Private investors should audit their own investments, but auditing is not going to succeed when records and research are deliberately falsified. There is no way to put the blame on investors for having been fooled by deliberate deception.

>The general public are not competent to audit their own investments, and even if they were it would be extremely inefficient, so we should probably have some government entity for that.

The general public generally entrusts its investment funds to people who are supposed to do the due diligence required. This due diligence is undermined by deception. As for the government getting involved, I agree it might need to be involved if the public can directly buy something (although there are some negative outcomes that come with it, such as regulatory capture and suppression of new stuff). The need for oversight applies even more when public money is used to fund research.

That happens all the time in the stock market and rarely anyone gets punished.

That is explicitly illegal in the stock market, and companies are frequently sued over deceptive practices. They have whole PR departments dedicated to making sure that they convey accurate (or at least defensible) information to investors.

I know it’s illegal but it’s still happening in various ways. Yes, once in a while investors do sue and win

Enforcement is a different matter entirely. I was originally responding to an argument about the legality of deception. A lack of enforcement does not make it more defensible.

No doubt! My father is suffering from Alzheimer’s and I have just been told that I have a few months left due to colorectal cancer. I can only wonder if there are/was/is something delaying better treatments for my condition. I am now on the hunt for alternative treatment options for me, and one of the molecules that has been suggested is highly controversial as it was suggested as a covid treatment.

The history of science is full of false starts ...

Ivermectin may or may not be effective against various cancers .. but it is a very safe molecule.

Look at the research independent of popular and institutional opinion.

If you can be part of a well run trial - of any kind, for any treatment - you give us all something of great value.

I can only hope things go well for you, and thank you for your courage.

Anti-body drug conjugates are a new promising technique in the treatment of cancer. Lots of these in the queue

https://www.bbc.com/storyworks/rewriting-cancer/the-exciting...

I hope that you can find an alternative treatment that works for you and that however many days you left, few or many, are filled with joy, love, and comfort. My sister just finished her recovery for breast cancer and her journey opened my eyes to the classic 'life is short.'

They have potentially condemned hundreds of thousands of people to suffer with this disease unnecessarily. The level of harm they have caused may be far worse than anything Josef Mengele did.

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