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Comment by GenerWork | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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 best leads we have are faked images?

I get that it is complicated but fraud in one area (images) makes the hard data extremely suspect.

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.

There have been many subsequent studies which generate evidence in support of the underlying idea.

As they say, it only takes one result to disprove a theory, but nobody has been able to do so to date.

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