List of high-level Alzheimer's researchers accused of credible fraud:🧵
#1 - Marc Tessier-Lavigne
Genentech pointed out problems in his 2009 Nature paper in 2012. After an expose by @tab_delete, he had to resign from Stanford Presidency, but can still run lab and do research.
@tab_delete #2 - Sylvain Lesné
His 2006 Nature paper has 3515 citations and greatly affected the direction of Alzheimer's R&D, leading researchers & companies to focus on targeting Aβ*56. It took 16 years before the fraudulent images were found by @schrag_matthew. Lesné remains a Professor.
@tab_delete @schrag_matthew # 3 - Hoau-Yan Wang
In June 2024 the DoJ indicted Wang for fraud on grant applications he submitted to NIH between 2017 - 2021, for which he received $16 M. In a 50 page report CUNY found him likely culpable for 14 separate allegations, but he still remains a Professor there.
@tab_delete @schrag_matthew # 4 - Eliezer Masliah
Masliah served as Director of the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Neuroscience between 2016-2024. Masliah is one of the top 5 most cited Alz researchers. @mumumouse2 has documented how his fraudulent work kicked off interest in drug Cerebrolysin.
Zlokovic is the world's leading expert on Alzheimer's and the blood-brain barrier. Two former lab members say that Zlokovic instructed them to make sure their lab notebooks were “clean”, meaning no data and results contrary to their paper’s conclusions.
@MicrobiomDigest, @mumumouse2, and an anonymous whistleblower have all raised concerns about clearly fraudulent images to @HHS_ORI & Temple University. Praticò blamed a grad student for some of the images. He remains Director of Alzheimer's Center at Temple.
@tab_delete @schrag_matthew @mumumouse2 @MicrobiomDigest @HHS_ORI For more analysis and links to detailed articles, see this post I just sent out on my newsletter: moreisdifferent.com/redirects/alzf…
Also, @JamesHeathers estimates that 14% of peer-reviewed publications contain some form of fraud. Check out his analysis here: osf.io/5rf2m
@tab_delete @schrag_matthew @mumumouse2 @MicrobiomDigest @HHS_ORI @jamesheathers I also recommend @BenLandauTaylor's excellent article in @PalladiumMag:
@FrancescaGino's ridiculous defamation lawsuit against @DataColada from last year has been dismissed by the court!
This is an important victory.. if this had been allowed to move forward it would have had a chilling effect on whistleblowers! storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
@francescagino @DataColada @DataColada's investigation was protected speech under the First Amendment! 🎉🎉🎉🎉
In other news, part of the Gino's lawsuit against Harvard was not dismissed -- the part having to do with the change in their policies surrounding research integrity. Also, Harvard's lawyers did not file for dismismissal of Gino's Title IX claim, so that is also moving forward.
As I explained before (see & link in post), doctors have been warning for a while that the #SARSCoV2 virus may weaken the immune system, if not permanently than for a very long period. It appears to be evolving to attack & disable parts of immune sys 2/3
Amateur Go player Kellin Pelrine can consistently beat "KataGo", an AI system that was once classified as "strongly superhuman".
Strikingly, the strategies employed to beat the AI do not foil other amateur players. ft.com/content/175e53…
2/ I believe this saga started when @MIT researchers found Go problems that are easy for humans, hard for AI.
In this example, black has a guaranteed win if it simply chains together black columns. Yet KataGo, playing against itself, looses as black 60% of time.
3/ Last year, Tony Wang presented another example in a talk he gave, which I can't find online. Both examples show KataGo can't discover certain long-time-horizon plans that are trivial for humans to figure out.. 2/
When I first saw @bryan_johnson's Blueprint, I thought it looked absurd.
However, I now find it extremely inspiring. He's showing us what is possible in the realm of human health. Nothing like it has been done before. I find it more inspiring than eg getting gold at Olympics.
2 days ago Bryan released a 1 hr 44 min overview of all the measurements etc he's doing:
On the surface it looks selfish spending so much $, but actually he's doing a huge public service w/ this incredible experiment.
watch to get a sense of how intense the Blueprint regimen is.
I find this way more inspiring than all the crazy athletic stuff people do, and it's a public service because he's doing a lot of measurements and publishing results online.
Cicero is a specialized narrow AI, actually ~7 modules linked together!
One may wonder though if the same system could be trained to do similar tasks. Yes, but in general not easily. It took them three years of work and a massive training dataset of tens of thousands of online games to create it. Even then, they had to expert annotate "intent" data..
A specialized filter had to be designed to filter nonsense from the dialogue model (over 100 keywords and phrases are filtered out)
In the end it only plays blitz Diplomacy can can't generalize to rule modifications or a different map like humans can without complete retraining.
Regarding the first argument.. It makes sense that your average Joe isn't donating to AI safety. There are many more salient issues, like local homelessness, or the latest natural disaster.
EA is all about using abstract philosophical reasoning to find neglected cause areas.
Existential risk from AI is real, but getting a grip on this fact requires processing a number of abstract arguments about the computational nature of mind, the difficulty of boxing, the difficulty of programming human values, the risk of fast take-off, and other considerations..