“You can cheat to get a paper. You can cheat to get a degree. You can cheat to get a grant. You can’t cheat to cure a disease,” he told me. “Biology doesn’t care.”

if false information is inserted into key nodes in our body of scientific knowledge it can warp our understanding. I

Aducanumab became the first approved Alzheimer’s therapy since 2003. It was the first approved drug said to actually slow cognitive decline, ostensibly by interrupting the biological basis of the disease rather than just treating symptoms such as anxiety or insomnia, or transiently damping down confusion among Alzheimer’s patients. Brand-named

UK neuroscientist John Hardy—like Selkoe, an illustrious scholar at the forefront of Alzheimer’s research—and his American colleague Gerald Higgins articulated that framework in one of the most famous papers in neuroscience history, published in April 1992 in Science: “Alzheimer’s Disease: The Amyloid Cascade Hypothesis.”

But the incentive structures of academia and pharmacology remain. As Schrag put it, “The field is absolutely calibrated to the newest, most interesting, most cutting-edge discovery. It disincentivizes replication at every turn . . . It’s not fun. It’s not interesting.” That’s despite the fact that many researchers have attempted to replicate the

Beware of dogma. Drill down to primary data behind big findings; they might prove troublingly thin. Treat everything with a degree of skepticism—especially one’s own assumptions.