Charles Piller

Charles Piller, investigative journalist for Science magazine and author of The Fail-Safe Society (1991) and Gene Wars (1998), discusses his latest book Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimers (2025). Historicising Alzheimer’s research, Piller Piller situates how whistleblower, Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag, exposed a massive scandal involving a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist (Sylvain Lesné) and a renowned director (Karen Ashe). Examining ego, professional aspirations together with the demands set upon researchers, Piller exposes how falsified data was at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease. Piller exposes Schrag's findings and this stunned not only the field of Alzheimer’s research, but the ripple effects this discovery had on research institution, the pharmaceutical industry, universities and the public. With the “amyloid hypothesis” now set within a web of scientific deceit, Piller elaborates how this hypothesis allowed a cause and effect, “an injection of hope and belief” whereby targetting these proteins became the dominanting thinking in the field for combatting Alzheimer’s disease. With the manipulation of data in plain sight, however, this necessarily put the future of Alzeiheimer’s research at risk where research diverging from amyloid focus had been side-lined or even actively deterred all in order to ensure the primacy of the amyloid hypothesis, which Piller terms the “amyloid mafia.”