alt Hacker NewsThe controversy over the amyloid hypothesis comes from a Stanford professor faking data[1] and setting the field back decades. The amount of harm this individual caused is hard to overstate. He is also still employed by Stanford.
[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resi...
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I know that it is very important for HN folks to be angry. But as someone who has a parent with this disease, I would like to be certain that the amyloid hypothesis is definitely not correct before we throw it entirely out with the bathwater. These simplified “one researcher caused an entire field to go astray for decades” explanations are much too pat for me to have any confidence in them.
Regardless, it is still important not to fall into the fallacy fallacy (just because someone made a bad argument for something does not imply that the conclusion is neccesarily false)
It's actually pretty easy to overstate the amount of harm caused by that one individual... you're doing it.
There are lots of good reasons to believe in the amyloid hypothesis, and no paper or even line of research is the one bedrock of the hypothesis. It was the foundational bedrock of Alzheimer's research back in the early 1990s (essentially, before Alzheimer's became one of the holy grail quests of modern medicine), after all; well before any of the fraudulent research into Alzheimer's was done.
The main good reason not to believe in amyloid is that every drug targeting amyloid plaques has failed to even slow Alzheimer's, even when they do impressive jobs in clearing out plaques--and that is a hell of a good reason to doubt the hypothesis. But no one is going to discover that failure until you have amyloid blockers read out their phase III clinical trial results, and that doesn't really happen until about a decade ago.