[light_hue_1]

It was not a cabal. It was scientific fraud.

Karen Ashe and Sylvain Lesné at Minnesota published a fake paper that redirected billions of research into the trash bin. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid... Amazingly both still have their jobs for life, both still publish, Ashe is still a member of the National Academy of Medicine, both are still getting grants.

[atombender]

This is a mischaracterization of the scope of the fraud. Lesné clearly committed fraud, but his work was not foundational. The fraud did not "redirect billions".

[light_hue_1]

Yes it very much did lead to billions of wasted dollars and that's if you count us public funding alone. Tens of billions of you count non us and private funding.

From https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...

The Nature paper has been cited in about 2300 scholarly articles—more than all but four other Alzheimer’s basic research reports published since 2006, according to the Web of Science database. Since then, annual NIH support for studies labeled “amyloid, oligomer, and Alzheimer’s” has risen from near zero to $287 million in 2021. Lesné and Ashe helped spark that explosion, experts say.

The paper provided an “important boost” to the amyloid and toxic oligomer hypotheses when they faced rising doubts, Südhof says. “Proponents loved it, because it seemed to be an independent validation of what they have been proposing for a long time.”

This is also a fun read https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/opinion/alzheimers-missed...

[pinkmuffinere]

From your description, it sounds like a large complex ecosystem (of which Lesne and Ashe were important parts) redirected billions. I think it’s a bit overselling it to say that their results alone redirected billions