[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

The idea of an oppressive scientific elite is a bit too neat and tidy. Certainly there are banal human politics at play, but it's hardly an explanation for all that ails. This idea is too attractive to the heterodox and outsiders cynical of scientific institutions.

Alzheimer's research having a focus on amyloid plaques makes perfect sense in light of so much data implicating it as a mediator of the disease. It's hard to say, even in retrospect, whether this focus was warranted or not. Allocation of scarce resources is hard, and everything comes at the expense of something else. It's easy to pick out 'fringe' ideas that bore fruit and lament how hard it was for them to gain traction. But what about all those that didn't? Were we really balanced too strongly to dominant ideas, or is science simply difficult?

You simply can't address this issue with the recent success of new or fringe ideas. You'd have to do something like systematically look at proposal acceptance rate vs. some subjective measure of heterodoxy vs. ultimate success. I just don't see compelling results from something like that.