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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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