Daniel Lemire's blog

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Science and Technology links (August 7 2022)

4 thoughts on “Science and Technology links (August 7 2022)”

  1. Derek Jones says:

    The situation with regard to the faked Beta-Amyloid data might better be described as “faked to support a hypothesis for which there is lots of other independent data”.
    See https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid-data-what-does-it-mean

    1. Thanks for the comment. It is true that Lesné’s fraud alone is not the sole foundation.

      From the essay you point at:

      Ever since the 1990s, researchers and clinicians have been spending uncountable hours (and uncountable dollars) trying to turn the amyloid hypothesis into a treatment for Alzheimer’s. I would not like to count the number of such attempts, nor even to try to list all of the variations. There have been all sorts of treat-the-symptoms approaches, for sure, but also a number of direct shots on goal. The enzymes that cleave beta-amyloid out of the APP protein (beta-secretase and gamma-secretase) have been targeted for inhibition, naturally. Small molecules have been sought that would slow down amyloid aggregation or even to promote its clearance. Most famously, antibodies have been produced against various forms of beta-amyloid itself, in attempts to interrupt their toxicity and cause them to be cleared by the immune system.

      Every single one of these interventions has failed in the clinic.

      From the conclusion of the essay you point at…

      We have to put money and effort down on other hypotheses and stop hammering, hammering, hammering on beta-amyloid so much. It isn’t working.

      A theory needs to be validated, and if researchers provide fraudulent validation, they ought to face severe consequences.

  2. Andrii Melnykov says:

    With regard to depression, my understanding is that the “chemical imbalance” explanation has always been a lie-to-children, meaning roughly that “depression has an unknown somatic/physical component so it’s not entirely psychological”.
    If you cite imbalance as if it was really meant, I suggest you revisit this idea by searching “antidepressants neuroplasticity”: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=antidepressants+neuroplasticity

    So, the paper “Antidepressants and synaptic plasticity: a hypothesis.” is from 1991 and there is ongoing research since that to pin down the neuroplasticity as the real mechanism of SSRI drugs.
    Then I guess you can revisit the Nature article in the light of the neuroplasticity hypothesis research.

  3. KK says:

    A research happens and a theory or hypothesis gets established. Then another theory or hypothesis comes that contradicts it!

    This is happening more and more and more these days.

    It is happening with anti-depressants now. Tomorrow it will happen with climate, with a paper in nature no less appearing that says co2 actually cools the world and that we should emit more of it. And climate change is actually a hoax.

    To avoid this i think you shouldnt hang yourself upside-down to every single paper that gets published (even in top journals like nature) because a ‘single’ paper or a ‘single’ study even if it is peer-reviewed can be wrong against ‘thousands’ of peer-reviewed papers that establish a theory or hypothesis.