Doctored

Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease, and the toll is projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. Families keep suffering while promised pharmaceutical breakthroughs fail to arrive. In Doctored, investigative journalist Charles Piller argues that research into a cure has quite likely been heading the wrong way for years, pushed off course by self-interested researchers, complicit government officials and corporate profit motives. The story begins with a whistleblower, Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag. He found that a University of Minnesota lab, run by a precocious young scientist and a director rumored to be in line for a Nobel Prize, had produced apparently falsified data at the center of the leading hypothesis about the disease. When Piller reported Schrag's findings, they stunned both the field and the public. Building on years of investigative reporting, Piller then traces a wide network of deceit and the people in it, reaching as far as the FDA. He presents evidence that hundreds of important Alzheimer's research papers rest on false data. He also follows a determined group of scientific renegades who have challenged the field's institutional powers despite the money and influence arrayed against them, on behalf of science and of the tens of thousands of patients enrolled in trials of dubious drugs. The consequences reach beyond Alzheimer's to scientific research, funding and oversight in general.