Restoring Public Trust in Science and Clearing Up Misconceptions About Alzheimer's Disease Controversies

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Published: Nov 4, 2024

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Tyler Smith
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

Scientific research is supposed to be conducted in pursuit of the truth while maintaining high ethics and standards to allow for trust between scientists and the public. There is a level of rigor that is expected to have been performed when a novel drug comes to market or a major advancement in science is announced. However, in the past few years, that notion has been challenged because of the falsification of data published about Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is the most common type of dementia. In 2022, about 6.5 million Americans were estimated to be living with AD, whereas a predicted 14 million Americans will be living with AD by 2060
(Kumar, 2021). One of the many hypotheses for what causes AD to develop is the aggregation of amyloid beta (Ab) plaque in the hippocampus and cortex of the brain. It is believed that these aggregates form tangles in the extracellular space between neurons in the brain leading to neuronal degeneration.

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 6 No. 2 (2023): Brain Matters
Section
Micro-Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Tyler Smith, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Tyler Smith is a senior majoring in Molecular and Cellular Biology. He works in the Gaj lab as a research assistant in the Bioengineering department. In the lab he conducts research on harnessing the therapeutic potential of CRISPR gene editing to treat neurodegenerative discases including Alzheimer's Disease and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). After graduation he intends to attend graduate school to further studyneurodegeneration and gene editing.