Inside The Corrupt World Of Alzheimer’s Science (And What Its Failure Means For All ‘Settled Science’)In Alzheimer’s — as in coronavirus and global warming — the science is far from settled.BY: CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD
JULY 28, 2022
An international cabal of scientists who believe in their own righteousness. Scientific journals, conferences, and grants that suppress dissent. Tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer, Big Pharma and venture capital money. Decades of research — and precious little to show for it all.
I’m not describing Covid, global warming, or any other highly politicized scientific debate. I’m talking about Alzheimer’s research. The implications for the rest of science, policy, and education, however, are deep and troubling.
Everyone in the United States knows about Alzheimer’s.Audiences across the country have read (or at least seen) “The Notebook.” More recently, “The Father,” starring Anthony Hopkins, won two Academy Awards and made basically everyone cry.
The reason so many of us cried is that so many know someone who’s suffered from this disease. We know what it is, we know what it does — and we know it’s terrible.
All that is to say we care about Alzheimer’s like we care about cancer, heart disease, and others that have touched us personally. Did you know, however, that despite being officially diagnosed over a century ago; despite all the grants, institutes, and money poured into it; and despite Americans’ personal interest in solving it, we haven’t discovered a single cure?
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Why not? To start, we might have been focused on the wrong thing.
Ever since Dr. Alois Alzheimer first identified the disease that now bears his name, we’ve taken an interest in the plaque deposits found in the brains of deceased patients. Follow-up research into the disease was slow to pick up, however, only gaining serious interest in the 1970s, when Congress established the National Institute on Aging (attached to the National Institutes of Health), and then gaining speed in the 1980s with private institutes joining the fray.
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By 1991, Science magazine reports, many scientists considered the amyloid thesis settled fact. Even serious studies casting doubt on the hypothesis were largely disregarded, including a 1991 study that found that, “although the brains of elderly Alzheimer’s patients had amyloid plaques, so did the brains of people the same age who died with no signs of dementia.”
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Straying outside the dogma would get you marked as a “traitor,” one prominent scientist explained, and could cost the heretic published articles, prominent posts, grant money for research, and speaking slots at prestigious conferences.
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The above is the story of how quickly greed, pride, and groupthink can get out of hand in even a strictly scientific field of research — one so many Americans across all parties and incomes and races are personally interested in figuring out.
How much easier, then, could this be in more politically fractious fields? In fields that allow the top scientists access to more than simple money and prestige, but also power.
In fields like global warming, where dissenters (or even mere skeptics) are labeled “deniers”? Just this week, Al Gore compared those skeptics to the Ulvade, Texas police, whose inaction contributed to the murder of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers.
Billions more dollars flow into this field than into Alzheimer’s research. In the name of global warming, organizations like the United Nations join powerful state actors across the planet in shaping policy and economics based on the favored research.
From its very beginning, global warming scientists’ most alarmist claims have been disproven, yet still they march on, confident as ever.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/28/inside-the-corrupt-world-of-alzheimers-science-and-what-its-failure-means-for-all-settled-science/
