Opinion | The Long Shadow of Fraud in Alzheimers Research

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.Take for example the revered neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah, whose groundbreaking research has shaped the development of treatments for memory loss and Parkinson’s disease, and who in 2016 was entrusted to lead the National Institute on Aging’s expanded effort to tackle Alzheimer’s.

With roughly 800 papers to his name, many of them considered highly influential, Dr.Masliah seemed a natural choice to...