Charles Piller — Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's - with Jenn White

Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer's disease, a tragedy that is already projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of pharmaceutical breakthroughs keep coming up short, investigative journalist Charles Piller's Doctored shows that we've quite likely been walking the wrong path to finding a cure all along--led astray by a cabal of self-interested researchers, government accomplices, and corporate greed.

Piller begins with a whistleblower--Vanderbilt professor Matthew Schrag--whose work exposed a massive scandal. Schrag found that a University of Minnesota lab led by a precocious young scientist and a Nobel Prize-rumored director delivered apparently falsified data at the heart of the leading hypothesis about the disease. Piller's revelations of Schrag's findings stunned the field and the public.

From there, based on years of investigative reporting, Doctored exposes a vast network of deceit and its players, all the way up to the FDA. Piller uncovers evidence that hundreds of important Alzheimer's research papers are based on false data. In the process, he reveals how even against a flood of money and influence, a determined cadre of scientific renegades have fought back to challenge the field's institutional powers in service to science and the tens of thousands of patients who have been drawn into trials to test dubious drugs. It is a shocking tale with huge ramifications not only for Alzheimer's disease, but for scientific research, funding, and oversight at large.

Charles Piller is an investigative journalist for Science magazine and his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Sacramento Bee, and more . Piller has been honored with many national journalism awards, and is the author of Gene Wars, The Fail-Safe Society, and Doctored. He has reported on public health, biological warfare, infectious disease outbreaks, and other topics from the United States, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central America. Follow him on X @CPiller.

Piller will be in conversation with Jenn White, an award-winning journalist and podcast host since 1999. White hosts 1A, a nationally syndicated daily news program from WAMU and NPR. She is also a familiar voice on several public radio podcasts, including Making Oprah, Making Obama and 16 Shots, which chronicled the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke.”