Medical advances have beaten back many relentless assassins in recent decades, such as cancer and heart disease. A wide range of treatments share credit: surgery, medicines, radiation, genetic therapies and healthful habits. Mortality rates for those two diseases, the top causes of death in the United States, have fallen sharply. But in an aging population, Alzheimer's death rates have gone in the opposite direction.
The disease afflicts nearly seven million Americans, about one in every nine people over the age of 65, making it a leading cause of death among older adults. Up to 420,000 adults in the prime of life — including people as young as 30 — suffer from early-onset Alzheimer's. The annual number of new cases of dementia is expected to double by 2050.
Yet despite decades of research, no treatment has been created that arrests Alzheimer's cognitive deterioration, let alone reverses it. That dismal lack of progress is partly because of the infinite complexity of the human brain, which has posed insurmountable challenges so far. Scientists, funders and drug companies have struggled to justify billions in costs and careers pursuing dead-end paths. But there's another, sinister, factor at play.
Over the past 25 years, Alzheimer's research has suffered a litany of ostensible fraud and other misconduct by world-famous researchers and obscure scientists alike, all trying to ascend in a brutally competitive field. During years of investigative reporting, I've uncovered many such cases, including several detailed for the first time in my forthcoming book...
This is why "trust the science" is almost a universally bad idea. Just because a, normally well respected, scientist claim something does not mean it should be taken as fact. Humans are primarily self interested creatures. Most will lie if it can benefit them in some way, with no exception to scientists.
ReplyDeleteIt is the responsibility of the individual to look deeper into the claims of scientist to try and sus out any biases. For example, leaded gasoline was said to be fine by scientists for years, even though they knew it wasn't because they were paid off to say that. So, if a scientists is being funded by a leaded gasoline corporation tells you it is all safe, take it with a grain of salt.
I'm sure you know what Reagan said: trust, but verify. Obviously we shouldn't defer to science or any other putative authority uncritically. But that doesn't make un-scientific discourse presumptively equivalent, a priori. Most scientists do not falsify data or misrepresent research. And unlike most un-scientific discourse, it is intrinsic to science to self-correct.
DeleteAs a practical matter, most of us have neither the time nor the competence either to corroborate or to disconfirm consensual scientific conclusions. But yes, we must remain skeptical and we must understand that it is in the nature of science constantly to reconstruct its provisional conclusions. That's an asset, not a deficiency.