Charles Piller: Fraud and Tragedy In the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's

Award-winning investigative journalist Charles Piller joins us in San Francisco for an in-depth look at what he says is a world of fraud, corruption, deceit, and greed that have set back important work on treating Alzheimer’s disease.

Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s, a tragedy that is projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Piller says that we’ve quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all along—led astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.

Drawing on the work in his new book Doctored, Piller highlights a whistleblower—Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag—whose work exposed a massive scandal. Schrag alleged that a university lab led by a precocious young scientist and a Nobel Prize–rumored director delivered apparently falsified data at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease.

From there, based on years of investigative reporting, Piller says he’s exposed a vast network of deceit and its players, all the way up to the FDA. He points to evidence that hundreds of important Alzheimer’s research papers are based on false data. In the process, he says even against a flood of money and influence, a determined cadre of scientific renegades have fought back to challenge the field’s institutional powers in service to science and the tens of thousands of patients who have been drawn into trials to test dubious drugs.

Photo by Mike McGee.

February 10, 2025

Speakers

Charles Piller
Investigative Journalist, Science; Author, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s; X @cpiller

Rachael Myrow
Senior Editor of KQED's Silicon Valley News Desk—Moderator

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