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It may or may not be the most significant retraction of a scientific paper ever, but it certainly is in the ballpark. The paper helped create and sustain the theory that amyloid protein buildups caused the symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease and was one of a number of apparently fraudulent papers written by Sylvain Lesné, a professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. All the paper's authors agreed to retract, save Lesné, who has been under investigation for manipulating data. "Authors of a landmark Alzheimer’s disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in...

Science leaders are demanding a crackdown on medical research fraudsters, warning that the worst offenders pose a threat to public health and should be handed prison sentences. And they have also called for academic journals that publish dodgy data to be slapped with hefty fines if they fail to act swiftly when fakes are exposed. The demands come after bombshell allegations that a pivotal study on the cause of Alzheimer’s disease contained manipulated results, potentially leading other scientists down a blind alley, hindering the development of effective treatments and giving false hope to patients and their families. It is just...

Critical elements of one of the most cited pieces of Alzheimer’s disease research in the last two decades may have been purposely manipulated, according to a report in Science. **SNIP** The highly influential paper, which was published in Nature in 2006, has helped guide billions of dollars in US federal government research into Alzheimer’s, according to Science. The study, which looked at cognitive decline in mice, proposed that a specific amyloid protein may be responsible for cognitive decline. The hypothesis has since dominated the field, and researchers have worked for years to understand the mechanism by which such proteins may...