Dr. Sylvain Lesné: Who Is He? How someone “manipulated” A study on Alzheimer’s in 2006 may have ruined decades of research and hope?
Part of a well-known study that changed the way Alzheimer’s research was done may have been made up, according to new evidence.
Science leaders said that a part of a well-known study on Alzheimer’s disease from 2006 could have been faked and was dangerous to the public’s health. Leaders are demanding that the worst offenders go to prison, and they are blaming the results of the study.
Thursday, Science magazine said it had found strong evidence that the image that was said to be the result of an Alzheimer’s study and was published in the journal Nature 16 years ago may have been made up. People are talking about Sylvain Lesné and his research again because of what the magazine said.
Who is Sylvain Lesné, M.D.?
Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, wrote a report in 2006 in which he first mentioned a type of protein called amyloid beta star 56. He said that this protein was the main reason why lab mice lost their memories. The report, which was written by Lesné, his boss Professor Karen Ashe, and other researchers, said that the name of the protein had been mentioned in more than 2,000 studies.
But Science said that they had found more than 70 possible cases of image tampering and about 20 studies by Lesné that seemed strange.
The first time Lesné’s study was called into question was when some experts tried to do the same thing and failed horribly. Then, they said that the image shown in the study results looked like it had been changed. Last year, a well-known researcher named Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, sent multiple papers to journals about the fake images.
When other Alzheimer’s researchers and forensic image analysis backed up Dr. Schrag’s reports, it gave his claims more weight. Karl Herrup, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute, said that Lesné’s findings have shocked the research community and are “really bad for science.”
Herrup, who works at the school’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, said, “It’s never a bad thing to be wrong in science.” “A lot of the best science was done by people who were wrong and then showed that they were wrong and why. Fraud is the worst thing you can do for science.”
The amyloid beta protein, which formed sticky plaques in the brain, was thought to be the real cause of Alzheimer’s until a study published in Nature in 2006 pointed to a subtype of the protein called A*56, or “amyloid beta star 56,” as the cause of memory loss.
Dr. Karen Ashe, a neuroscientist and professor at the University of Minnesota who co-wrote the 2006 paper, wants the whole thing to be taken back. “Having spent decades trying to figure out what causes Alzheimer’s disease so that better treatments can be found for patients, it is heartbreaking to learn that a co-worker may have misled me and the scientific community by changing images,” she said in an emailed statement.
A spokesperson for the University of Minnesota Medical School, Kat Dodge, said that the school is aware of the questions that have been raised about the studies written by Lesné and Ashe. “The University will follow its own procedures to look into any questions raised by the claims,” she said in a statement to NBC News on Monday.
