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To step back for a second, why is the question always re-directing funding when science funding overall has been steadily eroded by inflation and cuts since the 60s? A few months ago, I looked up the percentage of the American population that has PhDs and how it has changed over time. We have so, so, so much more advanced work and technical needs now that would benefit from them. To answer your question more specifically, our lab is actively trying to collaborate with people working on questions related to chronic inflammation (I am not sure what the funding status is, but I know someone from our lab is working there). In particular, microglial activation. Not to get lazy with cancer analogies, but if you look at what causes even a single cancer, it's often hundreds of events lining up perfectly. The question is, which one do we target to make an effective drug? The honest answer I have to this is that it's wishful thinking to think that that decision should be made at the level of basic science. How the funding and research ecosystem is supposed to work, is academia is supposed to explore all kinds of avenues, and then industry is supposed to exploit them and push the most promising avenues after. The problem is that when there's a crunch on science funding, "this is an unexplored avenue" is not enough, and you basically begin to take on the role of industry without any of the money. I think fraud is heavily incentivized by the funding crunch, too, actually. In the case of Eliezer Masalah, my impression is that his fraud was photoshopping images and faking experiments to add to collaborators' points to support other experiments that WERE actually conducted and made the points. I assume he was trying to get a very high impact factor for funding and promotions, but was trying to minimize the chances that he would get caught by making sure his research was part of works he assumed would be reproducible given that he assumed the others' research was legitimate. I haven't kept up with the case since it initially broke, though, and I didn't go through it as closely as I should have (I also do not focus much on alpha-synuclein). But, if you really want an answer as to why I think there is more funding on amyloids than chronic inflammation, it is that amyloids are Rome. Imagine a funnel. Chronic inflammation is near the entry to it, along with many other things. But shingles is not the only thing that might cause chronic inflammation that might cause Alzheimer's. Herpes has also been linked. So basically everything is at the very top of the funnel. But the reason people study amyloids is that they are at the very bottom of it. Chronic inflammation seems to cause them to misfold, but so do certain mutations, so if we can develop a drug that disaggregates and/or inhibits the growth of amyloids, we are stopping more causes than just looking at chronic inflammation, which is one of many. |