The Melanie Avalon Biohacking Podcast Episode #337 - Charles Piller 

TRANSCRIPT

 
Charles Piller
fake science and have it last forever. Because eventually it's going to be found that it's going to react. As Matthew Shraggus said, you can't cheat to cure disease. Biology doesn't care.

We have the right and the responsibility to insist that the institutions of science, and by that I mean the universities, the funders, the regulators like the Food and Drug Administration, and the journals that publish this information, the gatekeepers of knowledge, do a better job of monitoring and ensuring that the information coming out is believable.

Melanie Avalon
Welcome to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast, where we meet the world's top experts to explore the secrets of health, mindset, longevity, and so much more. Are you ready to take charge of your existence and biohack your life? This show is for you. Please keep in mind, we're not dispensing medical advice and are not responsible for any outcomes you may experience from implementing the tactics lying herein. So friends, are you ready to join me? Let's do this.

Welcome back to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast. Friends, I am honestly stunned, shocked, mind blown, and so grateful for today's conversation. Confession, I get pretty nervous when I'm interviewing investigative journalists because of course they are so highly respected and also they will know if I'm asking good questions or not. It was such an honor to connect with Charles Pillar and I was looking forward to this interview so so much. He is the guy who did the expose back in 2022 that made everyone aware of all the fraudulent data in Alzheimer's research. It was such a paradigm shift when it happened culturally. I remember when it happened. It was this massive realization moment where it became very clear that a lot of pharmaceuticals on the market today for Alzheimer's are based on fraudulent data.

This is so shocking and his incredible book, doctored, fraud, arrogance, and tragedy in the quest to cure Alzheimer's is such a riveting page turner and it's wild to think that it's actually real life. In today's conversation, we talk about so many things. We talk about how Charles goes about his work as an investigative journalist, how he tries to remain objective and without bias while portraying accurate character portrayals of the humans that he has interacted with in his investigations. We talk about the discovery and rise of Alzheimer's and why today it is so seemingly fixed on the amyloid cascade hypothesis. We talk about the actual role of amyloid plaque in Alzheimer's. Charles shares what he learned doing his investigation into the fraudulent data. We're talking major scandals, investigations, lawsuits, coverups. It is crazy, including a surprise twist that happened as of this recording just a few days ago. But when you listen probably a few months ago, we talk about how there can still be truth in science, especially when there can be a slightly toxic culture at universities. But don't worry, it's not all doom and gloom. We also talk about the potential of new paradigms and new solutions and new help for those with Alzheimer's as well as the potential role of AI and looking at data, although that might be a little bit tricky and come with its own problems.

And that is just the start. Prepare for your mind to be blown. This was honestly one of my favorite conversations I've ever had on the show. Go get doctored now. The show notes for today's episode will be at Melanie Avalon dot com slash doctored. Those show notes will have a full transcript as well as links to everything that we talked about. So definitely check that out. I can't wait to hear what you guys think. Definitely let me know in my Facebook group.

Melanie Avalon
I have biohackers, intermittent fasting plus real foods plus life. Comment something you learned or something that resonated with you on the pinned post to enter to win something that I love and then check out my Instagram. Find the Friday announcement post and again, comments there to enter to win something that I love. All right. I think that's all the things without further ado, please enjoy this fabulous conversation with Charles Pillar.

Hi friends, welcome back to the show. I cannot even express how excited I am about the conversation I am about to have. So the backstory on today's conversation, we have done quite a few episodes on this show on supporting cognitive help, preventing cognitive decline, and in particular addressing Alzheimer's. So things like we've had Max Lugaver on for Genius Foods, that sure as eyes at Loma Linda, Mark Milston for The H-Proof Brain. And then actually, as of this recording, like last week I think, we aired Dr. Heather Sanderson for Reversing Alzheimer's. And the commonality in all of these episodes is less a pharmaceutical approach to addressing Alzheimer's and more a comprehensive approach and what can you do with diet and lifestyle and all those things. And when we talk about the role of Amloid Plaque in Alzheimer's in those shows, I think all of them we have pretty much acknowledged the role of Amloid Plaque in cognitive decline in Alzheimer's, but also talked about how that may not be the whole picture, how people can even have substantial levels of plaque in their brain and yet not have any symptoms of Alzheimer's. So there's probably something bigger going on there. So in any case, in 2002, so I had this general understanding of everything, and then in 2002, I actually remember literally where I was when I heard about this shocking article that came out in science indicating that there might actually be a lot of fraud in the history of studying Alzheimer's and that a lot of our pharmaceuticals today could be based on fraudulent data. And it was absolutely shocking. So the article was published in science and it was called Blots on a Field. A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication and scores of Alzheimer's articles threatening a reigning theory of the disease. And this was published July 21st, 2022. And again, like I said, when it came out, I was really, really shocked, although not surprised given my hesitancies about the pharmaceutical industry and my doubts and suspicions. But in any case, fast forward a little bit later, and I got a email about having that author, that journalist on the show, Charles Piller, he's here with us now, and he released a book called Dr. Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's, came out in February, 2025. Friends, this was one of the moments where when I got the email, I just couldn't even describe how excited I was because I mean, this has been such a paradigm shift, game-changing work that has changed so many people.

Melanie Avalon
And then reading the book, everybody please get it now because not only is it a complete riveting page turner, I mean, it feels like a work of fiction. It's so fascinating and dark and twisty and turny. So not only is it like just fascinating from like a drama perspective, but it will completely give you a paradigm shift on how we view medical literature, and in particular, the entire field of Alzheimer's.

And I'm sure we'll talk about it all in this show, but long story short, basically Charles got a pitch or a tip about that this was going down. He worked with a whistleblower, Matthew Schrag. They looked into fraudulent research at a company called Casava Sciences for their drug, and I hope I don't butcher all these names, but Cymophilum, in particular with work by Lindsey Burns and Huen Wang, which by the way, as of three days ago, I think there is a major updates in that case. So we're gonna have to talk about that. And then just from that initial tip, it led to research into the entire field of Alzheimer's as a whole, because of some going back to a paper in 2006 by Karen Ash and Sylvain Lesnay, which kind of indicated that maybe the whole, the entire industry is based on a fraudulent concept, not even just data. It just goes on deeper and deeper beyond that. So I cannot wait for this conversation. I have absolutely so many questions. Charles, thank you so much for all that you do, and thank you so much for being here.

Charles Piller
Thank you so much for having me, Melanin. I'm delighted to be here.

Melanie Avalon
So I really want to dive deep into this entire story, especially because we have a major update, like I said, with one of the figures as of a couple days ago. So we'll have to get into that.

But to start things off, so I'm super curious in your work as an investigative journalist, you, I mean, historically, you've won a ton of awards, you've worked on all different sorts of topics. When this tip first came to you, did you, like, did you anticipate and expect where it was going? I'm really curious, like, how many tips you get, like, in a day or a month or a week and how many you consider, how many you do, how you know which ones to go after? And in particular, with this one, like, what was that like?

Charles Piller
Sure. So, yes, I get a lot of tips. And part of it is that there aren't that many people like me out there, namely investigative reporters who specialize in scientific topics. And consequently, a lot of people do come to me, especially now in the realm of Alzheimer's disease and other research fields, because I've done so many investigations in that realm. And people are looking around sometimes for help in understanding problems that they see or issues of potential misconduct or fraud that they think need a little more examination.

It turns out that in most cases, I can't do anything with those tips. And the reason is that I work only on national or global stories. And that's because science, the magazine that I work for, it is a magazine for national or global audience. And even though there may be very worthy concerns about more local stories, they're just not ones that I can make the time to work on. This time I was tipped via a colleague about a whistleblower by the name of Matthew Schrag at Vanderbilt University. And initially, when I made contact with Schrag, he was very reticent. He was wary of working with a reporter because he was concerned about the possibility that his privacy might be invaded, that he maybe wasn't prepared for the notoriety that could come with exposing an apparent medical research scandal. And so we had to have lots and lots of conversations to build trust with each other in order to get to the point where he was not just willing to tell me his story and the information that he was able to uncover, but also to describe his personal journey, which was, to me, really at the heart of things, to tell the human story behind the concerns about fraud and misconduct in the field.

Melanie Avalon
So question actually about that because one of the things I really loved about your book is you go, you do just that. What you just said, you really go into all of these different humans and characters and their life stories and where they got today.

And this is something I think about a lot because how do you try to remain objective when you're creating a, like a personal story characterization of a person because like even in real life with any given person, we all have our own different opinions and perspectives of any given person. So how do you, like, how do you stay objective or do you try to stay objective when you are characterizing these real life humans?

Charles Piller
Yeah, that's a great question, Melanie. It's something I think about a lot and have to work hard at because kind of the essence of journalism is to retain it as much objectivity as you can. Of course, we all have our own bias. And I think it's unrealistic to think that we're not affected by the people that we talk with and interview, but we all do due diligence as well.

So for example, Matthew Schrag, who is, in my view, a pretty heroic character and someone who's very important in the book, I didn't just take it on faith that what he was telling me was true and correct. I spent an enormous amount of time vetting him and vetting his information to be sure that I wasn't being in a sense kind of seduced by his apparent honesty and clarity and the courage that he showed in the process of uncovering problems in his chosen field. By the same token, there's some people in the book who, you know, they look pretty bad because they engaged in a parent misconduct or actually demonstrated misconduct or fraud in the work that they're doing. And consequently, the struggle there, I think, is to retain a degree of empathy because these are human beings. And even if they did bad things, I think I need to represent them as three-dimensional people who have their own struggles and who, I think in the long run, understanding them as people helps you understand how science itself can be taken down the wrong path and how we might ultimately, in a kind of humane way, try to correct it.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I cannot agree anymore. And it's part of the reason that I, again, that I so love the book.

Well, I think one of the most riveting moments for me was when you met with Karen Ash and was describing just all of the seeming contradictions and how she was, you know, interacting with you at her lab. To that point, all of these people that you met with, you talk in the book about how it's really important to you that you reach out to, or is it important to you that you reach out to everybody that you're going to write about before you write before you release anything where they're mentioned.

Charles Piller
Sure. I mean, beyond reaching out to them, I think people probably are familiar with the idea of just basic fairness in journalism, where if you're writing about someone, particularly about problems in their work, it's absolutely essential to give them every opportunity to respond and tell their side of the story.

And in fact, it's not just important out of a basic sense of fairness, but it's fundamental to the highest obligation that I have as a journalist, which is to my readers. In order to give them the biggest, clearest, and most accurate picture of the story that I'm telling, I really need the people who are involved in this story to have their opportunity to respond. And so consequently, when I am developing a set of information that might suggest wrongdoing or misconduct in scientific research, I provide all of that to the subject of the investigation, every bit of it, along with questions that make it abundantly clear what's going to be in the story. So there are no surprises, never any surprises. Unfortunately, I've found over and over that many people in that situation most, in fact, don't want to talk to me, don't want to talk to any journalist. And I think it's often because they don't have a good story to tell, but you have to give them that opportunity.

Melanie Avalon
They don't have a good story as in like they don't have a truth-based, like they have stuff to hide. Yeah, exactly.

Charles Piller
exactly right, things that are incriminating and they don't want to be put in a position of having to explain those.

Melanie Avalon
So it was really interesting because Matthew Schrag, and you talked about this, you talked about in the book about how overwhelmingly concerned he was about coming public and you had to have a lot of conversations with him because of the concerns about his name getting out there and alienating people in his field and how it might affect his career. And that actually extends to stuff you talk about later in the book about problems at universities where students might suspect that things are going on in their labs or might even know and can they speak up, do they speak up, what happens if they speak up.

But it was interesting when Matthew did put his name out there via your story and people did come after him and then they actually found that his name was associated from a long time ago on a paper that had fraudulent data in it and you actually spoke with his mentor at the time, Vivian, something I think. So when that happened, were you, well, A, were you like concerned when you saw that oh, maybe even Matthew was associated with fraudulent data? What did that tell you when even these like side explorations were coming up with fraudulent data?

Charles Piller
Yeah, there was this situation with Matthew Schrag and he is somebody who I regard as a person of incredible personal integrity and honor. And of course, he was making himself into a big target by eventually going public with concerns and accusations about possible image doctoring and other forms of misconduct associated with Alzheimer's researchers.

And naturally when that happens, he himself becomes a target. And a lot of people went through his work painstakingly going back all the way back to his undergraduate days at the University of North Dakota many years ago. And what they found was that there were some possible problems in some of the images in scientific articles that he was a co-author of as an undergraduate, a complete neophyte just learning how to do this lab work. And the articles were led by, and the chief author was his mentor, his beloved mentor, I might add, a guy by the name of Othman Grebe. And Grebe was someone who introduced Schrag to science, who was the, in a way, the inspiration for how he ended up both as a medical doctor and a research scientist, and someone who he had been friends with for decades. So when these accusations came up about these articles way back when, Schrag naturally dropped everything to look into whether the concerns were valid. And lo and behold, he found that they were valid, that there was very clear signs of image doctoring these articles, not by himself, but by his mentor, because he was just a callow college student at that time and was not involved in the creation of those images. He got his name on the paper for being a lab assistant, which is very, very normal in that world. So consequently, he dived in and took a look at not just those articles that had been called out by others, but he looked at the full body of work that Dr. Grebe had been involved with, his corpus of work, if you will, involving dozens and dozens of articles and found many problems in the work. This was stunning to Schrag. And he, of course, confronted Grebe, and it was an incredibly horrible, tearful kind of conversation where, according to Schrag, Grebe admitted that he was involved in having inappropriately changed scientific images to reflect what he thought was the experimental hypothesis. And this is really completely improper in science, a complete example of how misconduct develops and how it can affect the outcome of experiments. And so ultimately, Schrag went public about this via an article that I wrote for Science, incredibly painful episode. But to me, it cemented my view of him as someone who is above approach. And so far, he was willing to examine even his own work and that of his beloved mentor.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. So, so many questions that come up from this and we can, you know, we still need to talk about what actually you guys were investigating with that first story, but just going off of some of the things you were talking about just now. So like the idea that this happened when Shrag was a, you know, like a younger undergrad, you know, not, he just newer to the field, maybe not as aware of what was actually happening. I'm really curious what you think of the culture of this research that is conducted and two things. So for the younger people, like the undergrads, the young students, and I know one of Shrag's concerns was that younger scientists might get actually harmed by his revelations who actually weren't even aware of things that were happening, but they're attached, their names are attached to papers kind of like in his own situation.

Like what are your thoughts on the responsibility of younger scientists and undergrads doing this work? The second question, which is a little bit different, I'm really curious your thoughts on, because you mentioned how that researcher had changed the data to support his hypothesis. I'm so curious if you think these scientists who are doing these changes, do they actually, do they all really believe what they're trying to prove? Or are they just trying to make money? Like, I'm just curious like how so many people can be doing this, this fraud.

Charles Piller
Those are really good questions, Melanie. I want to just say briefly, though, at the outset, that I believe that most scientists, like most people in most walks of life, are doing their level best to do good quality work, work that is believable, incredible, and might, in the case of science, really push forward human understanding in valuable ways. So the problem is that even a small minority of either corrupt science or situations where things are pushed beyond their actual limits to elements of experiments that are no longer credible, these are things that can skew thinking in the field in important ways, and particularly if they're coming out of labs that are highly respected by scientists who are really important in the field, they can have a dramatic effect on the thinking of other scientists and on funding and on directions in science. And even though science is a field that is, they say, self-correcting, so that's one of the great qualities of it, you can't fake science and have it last forever because eventually it's going to be found that it's incorrect.

And as Matthew Schrager said, you can't cheat to cure a disease, biology doesn't care, is one of the things he said to me. And that's completely true, but the problem is you can cheat and then have it be a very problematic situation for a long period of time because that self-correction process can take months or even years or sometimes even decades. So it can be very tragic at how it skews the field during that interim period. Now with regard to students and professors, you know, you see it go both ways. Sometimes you see professors who are extremely ambitious and are deeply convinced of their ideas and they provide a lot of pressure on trainees. These would be postdoctoral fellows, these are people who have their PhDs but are working in labs and trying to build up enough on their resume to get a job, a regular job as a professor themselves, or students who are learning the trade. And they are pressured by these higher level, important professors who are running the lab. And these folks might be creating kind of pressure cooker environment where they don't accept anything but results that fit the ideas they have and that support their general hypothesis of experimentation. And when this happens, there can be enormous pressure to fudge data or to change data so that it fits in. And we've even seen a lot of situations these days where the pressure on students who are from other countries who are here on visas can be extreme. And sometimes the professors that they're working for have complete power over their ability to stay in the country. And so there's kind of an implied threat. If you don't get the results I'm looking for, then your visa is going to be canceled and you have to go back.

Charles Piller
So these are really serious problems in the way some labs are run. There can be a kind of culture of misconduct or a culture of pressure that can lead to misconduct.

And I remember one situation that I wrote about somewhat extensively, both in the magazine and the book, involved a very famous and important professor at the University of Southern California, a guy by the name of Bareslav Zlokovich. And the environment of his lab, as described to me by multiple students and junior scientists, was one of a pressure cooker where results that didn't support his ideas were ridiculed, diminished. The pressure was so extreme that one of the individuals who I interviewed, who was a junior scientist in the lab for a long time, was literally sobbing through an hour and a half interview because she was so distraught by the difficulties that she faced and the contradictions and also the pain of engaging in research that she knew had problems and wasn't well supported by the actual science. So it can be very, very stressful when you have that sort of situation.

Melanie Avalon
What's so eye-opening about it to me is especially just like as a theme in my audience and the world I'm in, in biohacking, we do a lot of talking about, I mean, health studies and medical literature all the time. And there's like a high-level understanding of, oh, what if we as the reader or the writer, the author, the doctor, what if we're misinterpreting the data or what if we're filtering these studies to fit our narrative, so correlation versus causation or cherry-picking studies.

But I think most of us, at least me until I read your book, I was kind of capping it out there as that being the problem, like taking the studies and then cherry-picking the studies to create a thesis or a narrative. But now knowing, and again, like you said, not the whole field, but it just takes a few bad apples to do a lot of damage, now knowing that the actual studies themselves, just from the very, very beginning, like the genesis, like the lab where the students are in, that there can be this cherry-picking and fudging of data, it just makes me wonder like how to know anything.

Charles Piller
forward. I mean, you know, you raise a good point, Melanie, and I think one of the things that I've had to continually remind myself of is that, you know, as a person who loves research, who deeply respects the importance of biomedical research in improving the human condition, which I do deeply believe in that, I have to continually remember that I think, again, most scientists are honest, many of the studies that come out are completely believable. But science is a human endeavor. And like in any human endeavor, mistakes are made and human bias enters in. And sometimes, I think in a small minority of cases, there is corruption that enters into the process. And so, as consumers of that information, as taxpayers and patients and readers and, you know, frankly, anyone in this culture, we have standing to insist that the scientific community does the job better. In other words, it's not acceptable to have the degree of misconduct that we see out in the scientific world.

It's not acceptable to have this sort of problem with the manipulation of scientific images to improperly support a scientific experimental hypothesis. We have the right and the responsibility to insist that the institutions of science, and by that I mean the universities, the funders, the regulators, like the Food and Drug Administration, and the journals that publish this information, the gatekeepers of knowledge, do a better job of monitoring and ensuring that the information coming out is believable. Now, that said, and we'll probably get into this more later in the discussion, Melanie, but I just feel like I have to interject that, you know, right now, science is in an interesting and difficult situation because of the vast attacks on public health officials and on scientists by people who are very suspicious of this work and including the vast cutbacks and attacks on universities and research by certain individuals in the Trump administration who have radically curtailed certain lines of research because of suspicion about the work. And for me, I have to remind people and remind myself that two things can be true at once. One is that science is a human endeavor and mistakes are made and we need to insist that the work be done better and more reliably. But at the same time, attacks on science and the diminishment of the scientific enterprise and the reduction in funding in key areas and the attacks on the credibility of public health officials and scientists are also reprehensible and really are not part of the solution to this problem.

Melanie Avalon
I so appreciate you, you know, drawing attention to all of the nuance here and makes me even more grateful that you're the person writing this book. This is a very much like a rabbit hole tangent question and very specific, but I'm just really curious.

You're talking about the agency and the role that we can take as non-scientists and consumers of this information and also like speaking up and advocacy and making sure that the money goes where it should go in science and that things are done properly. An example of when I think this maybe filters into like a very practical real life situation. And I know you can't give like a single answer on this, but I wonder this every time it happens to me. If I'm like at the doctor getting some sort of scan or something and it gives me the option to opt in my results to research, what are your thoughts on that? Because I know I'm thinking about it even more because I'm seeing how data could potentially be used in trials and people, and we can talk more about this later, but because you actually have a case study of a man who was in one of the, I think the, was it the phase one trial for saimufilum?

Charles Piller
Yeah, the phase two trial, actually.

Melanie Avalon
So there are a lot of, you know, fascinating things that happen in these trials, but so just really quick rabbit hole question What do you think about like blindly opting in your data into research for science?

Charles Piller
Well, I wouldn't encourage anyone to blindly opt into anything. I think you need to read the fine print and make sure that you're satisfied that the work is going into something useful and productive.

That said, the way medical research advances is by people volunteering and being willing to participate and to lend their time and their data to the bigger goal of helping others. And so this is a noble and important thing to do. And it's true that sometimes that process can be corrupted and sometimes it can be misused. And that's why it's good to do your due diligence and to read the disclosures of the experiment before just signing on blindly. But that said, I'm a big supporter of this research. I think it's vital to advance human knowledge and ultimately hopefully to find cures for these dreaded diseases.

Melanie Avalon
I tend to overthink it when it's happening because I think a lot of people do not read the fine print and there's like just a checkbox. And I always have this whole moment where I'm like, but what if I'm opting into, like I don't even know what I'm opting into, but I want to help science.

But also like, so it's, um, it's an interesting real life practical example for me. Going back to the tip and Matthew Schrag and working with him, what was the initial investigation that you guys were looking into with cassava sciences and semi-filim?

Charles Piller
Sure. So, the way this worked is that Schrag had been working for a while on uncovering a parent data doctoring in work that was behind the development of this drug, samufilum from Casada Sciences. And this was an Alzheimer's drug. And what Schrag found was that case after case, example after example, of the basic laboratory research that led to the approval by the FDA that this could be tested in people, that this research was based on apparently doctored images, apparently fraudulent images. And as a result, he became involved in exposing this. There was a petition written to the Food and Drug Administration to shut the trial down, shut the clinical trial down. That's the trial with patients taking the drug. And that effort failed, although it resulted in a lot of exposure of this information about apparently doctored images in these studies. And a lot of concern grew from that about the drug, samufilum.

But I think what's so interesting to me about that story is how it led to a much bigger set of concerns about the field of research into Alzheimer's disease. And maybe this would be a one step back and talk a little bit about the history of Alzheimer's and why it's been such a difficult intractable condition for scientists and doctors to be able to turn back. So just, I'm going to give a little two minute history of the disease. So this disease was named after a German scientist, Alzheimer, who back in 1908, he found in a patient who he had been following after she died, he found these characteristic examples of certain proteins in her brain. And this is a woman who had had terrible, terrible dementia at a pretty early age in her fifties originally. And the proteins he found in her brain were things called amyloid plaques. These are the kind of characteristic sticky plaques that people may have heard of that accumulate in the brain. And something called tangles, which are a different protein called tau, which are inside the neurons, the nerve cells within the brain. And the combination of plaques, tangles, and cognitive decline or dementia is essentially what became the definition of Alzheimer's disease. And so this was back in the early 1900s when actually because of pure demographic reasons, it was more of a curiosity than a disease that many, many people felt they had to study right away, because just not that many people live to the old age that is characteristic of when Alzheimer's symptoms begin, usually in late 60s, 70s, 80s. And as the decades rolled by, and many new medical treatments and developments came into common use like antibiotics and vaccines and treatments for cancer and heart disease that were increasingly effective, you started to see people living longer and longer lives. And when you started to have a population of many millions of older people, then the rate of Alzheimer's disease increased a lot because it's a disease primarily of old age.

What happened was that scientists began to spend an enormous amount of time working on the fundamental ideas behind what you could do to take care of Alzheimer's disease.

Charles Piller
And an idea about the disease came up something called the amyloid cascade hypothesis. And the way it works is that this accumulation of amyloid plaques, these sticky plaques in the brain, leads to a series of biochemical events that eventually kills brain cells and causes the dementia of Alzheimer's disease. And so this problem of the amyloid plaques being the linchpin of the disease became the dominant idea in science associated with Alzheimer's. And many millions, even billions of dollars report into trying to develop treatments that would remove these plaques from the brain. And so treatment after treatment was developed, these were drugs and also even a vaccine to try to remove these plaques. And what they found was they could do that pretty well. They could remove the amyloid plaques from the brain. And yet, they, in treatment after treatment, trial after trial, they failed to arrest or reverse the cognitive decline of Alzheimer's disease. And so you had the situation where you are ostensibly doing something really important, removing what was thought to be the cause of the disease. And in fact, it was ineffective in treating the disease.

And it often resulted in terrible side effects, including side effects that could kill people by creating swelling and bleeding in the brain. And so there was a lot of discouragement in the field. And so finally, Melanie, I'm getting back to the essence of your question. So there was a lot of discouragement in the field until 2006, when this experiment that you mentioned earlier by two scientists at the University of Minnesota, Karen Ash, who was an illustrious Alzheimer's scientist, and her protege, Sylvain Lesnay, who was a Frenchman who was working in her lab in Minnesota. And the two of them came up with a very, very clever experiment, which is that they identified a very specific protein, part of the amyloid family, called amyloid beta star 56, kind of their star protein. And they created genetically engineered mice that produced copious volumes of this protein. And they extracted this protein from the mice's brain, purified it and injected it into rats. And the rats showed symptoms of memory loss that they described as being similar to the memory loss that Alzheimer's patients experience. And so what you had was, for the first time, a kind of cause and effect relationship between a particular substance, in this case, a certain kind of amyloid protein, and the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. And this reinvigorated the field. And scientists all over the world started to say, okay, we are really still on the right track. We just haven't found quite the right experiment to create the right drug to help us help Alzheimer's patients. But we know that this idea of the amyloid cascade hypothesis is the true and correct way of going after the disease. And so that was a watershed moment.

Okay, so we're back to Matthew Schrag now, finally. So Schrag was examining his own techniques for interrogating scientific images. And in doing so, he wanted to venture out, farther out from the examination of images from experiments that supported this drug, subufulam from cassava sciences.

Charles Piller
And he stumbled on this experiment by Ash and Lesne, the one that was the historic experiment that reinvigorated the field of Alzheimer's research. And what they found, what I'm sorry, what Schrag found in his examination of that study is that many of the images appeared to be based on improper manipulation, moving portions of these images around improperly to help support the experimental hypothesis, or literally altering the images in ways that couldn't possibly have occurred. And because the evidence for this was so clear, seemed clear to him, he and I started talking about this. And we both realized in kind of a never forget this moment, when we were talking with each other about it, this kind of stunned silence came over us because we realized that this very influential experiment that had steered literally hundreds of millions of dollars in funding over a period of more than a decade, and was one of the most cited Alzheimer's experiments in a couple of decades, cited in other scientific literature. So in other words, highly influential in the field.

When we realized that it might apparently have been based on false information, the implications of it were pretty, pretty extreme. The implications were that it might have a big effect on thinking about the amyloid hypothesis, and how narrow it might be, and how it might cause people to revise some of their ideas about this hypothesis that was so fundamental to thinking in the field. That began in a way that was the genesis of my work on all this, and the genesis of my book, Doctor.

Melanie Avalon
Wow, thank you. That was really, really fascinating and really, really helpful.

So basically prior to that 2006 paper about the amyloid beta star 56, it was, so amyloid plaque was thought to probably be causative, but it could also be like correlational. But then after that paper, it was like, oh no, this is causative. That was what it was solidifying.

Charles Piller
And it reinvigorated people's ideas that, yes, we know what path the sort of pathogenic properties of amyloid proteins travels, how it affects the brain, how it kicks off the process that leads to dementia. And it just made people more and more sure of their ideas. Wow. Okay.

Melanie Avalon
Was it after that initial study that you did that they released the preprint and kind of changed their narrative about Amelie Beta star 56? They kind of said it both existed and didn't exist at the same time.

Charles Piller
Yeah, it was a while later. I mean, after my story appeared in Science in 2022, that really dramatically discredited that experiment. And it discredited not just because Matthew Fragg thought he saw something there, but because I vetted his findings with other experts in forensic image analysis. And I vetted them with leading scientists in the field of Alzheimer's research. And there was general agreement that this experiment was apparently based on misconduct.

In addition, many other subsidiary experiments by that same research group, Karen Asch and Lesnay, and then later Lesnay by himself, were also similarly affected by a parent image doctrine. And so it wasn't just that one experiment, it was a whole body of work associated with this idea that they were bringing forward. And so years later, what happened was after that is that both of those scientists were under a cloud of suspicion. And it dramatically affected their ability to raise funds and to do the work that they were trying to do in their labs. And yet, Karen Asch in particular, she set out to try to see if she could somehow salvage the work. And even though that study, which in it was published, the 2006 study was published in the journal Nature, which is one of the most important influential scientific scholarly journals in the world, it was eventually retracted. And it was retracted because people agreed that the images were doctored.

And you can't prove a scientific point with doctored images. So eventually, Karen Asch tried to salvage her thinking about this and came up with a kind of muddled paper that both, as you noted, Melanie, it both seemed to both prove and disprove findings at the same time. It's very meta, you might say, in it.

Melanie Avalon
It's really wild just reading all of it. And going back to what we were talking about right in the beginning about the human view of everything that's happening in science, it's just really interesting to see things that people do to keep championing whatever hypothesis they might have.

So reanalyzing the data a different way, putting out these new ideas that are very hand wavy and with the pre-print. I was really surprised how, I don't know how many times this happened, but it seemed like there are a few cases where they're investigating different instances of fraud and the researchers could just conveniently say that they don't have the original data. That seems really easy. I don't know if it's easy to get away with, but you can do that. You can just be like, oh, I don't have the originals.

Charles Piller
You know, there is a little bit of nuance to it. So for example, studies from a long, long time ago, to me, it's somewhat understandable. People didn't keep the original data, especially if it's like 20 or more years ago. But a general principle in science is save your work. And you do that for the very reason that you never know when you might have a question that you want to go back to the original data to answer.

And increasingly in science, people are using that. It's, you know, kind of the dog ate my homework excuse. You know, if you cannot produce the original data from an experiment, then in many cases, that can be a form of misconduct. Just to give you an example, of course, we've been talking about this drug, Simufilum from Casaba Sciences. And Dr. Wang from the City University of New York, who was a scientist who was deeply involved in the basic research behind that drug. In other words, the laboratory experiments that led to its development. He was so important to this whole process. And yet, when his work was questioned, it turns out that he saved nothing. He threw away all of his original data. And consequently, what happens is that it becomes very difficult to definitively prove that it was based on misconduct, because you need to compare the examples that were published in journals with the original images and to see whether they compare and contrast appropriately and to ensure that they were not changed improperly. But when you throw all that out, there's nothing to look at. And this is, you know, a really egregious case of that.

Melanie Avalon
Well, actually to that point, so last night I was reading all of the latest updates on that journey with Wang and I'm really curious to hear your thoughts. So what had happened when the book published, so everything I had read in the book was they, you know, were doing investigations, the City University of New York. There was a whole laundry list of things that he was accused of potentially doing. And then he was up for fraud charges or like fraud against like the US. I'll let you say what he was up for.

Now there's like a whole plot twist as of like a couple days ago.

Charles Piller
Yeah, it's been a strange, strange case. So just to kind of summarize briefly, a couple years back, the City University of New York asked a panel of their own scientists, faculty members there, to evaluate his work. And the reason they did it was, of course, that a lot of questions had been raised about it, and they wanted to give a thorough and honest look at what their own body of peers would say about that. And so this panel came out with a report that was not disclosed by the university, and they sat on it for many months. And ultimately, that report was leaked to me. And I wrote an article about it in Science and published the report on our website. And the report is pretty interesting. It finds the sky long at City University of New York, in regard to the studies that were in question pertaining to some muculum, the drug and other aspects of his research, that he engaged in egregious scientific misconduct by essentially throwing away all of his work. So no one could check it. And they also said that it would be very, very difficult to say definitively that he had engaged in misconduct in regard to individual experiments because they had no images to examine. All they had was what he claimed in his published images that looked basically very phony, but without comparing them against the original data, hard to say with complete and total assurance that he had doctored the images. So it was a very, very strange situation.

So when I wrote my story and published that report on the website of Science magazine, the university, instead of publicly responding and instead of taking action on their own faculty report that concluded that he had engaged in egregious misconduct, instead of doing that, they hired a law firm and paid them $1.25 million to find the person who leaked the report to me, which I might have had. They never found the person. So money well spent and a real example of integrity in scholarship. I got to tell you, I'm sorry, I'm being facetious about it, but it's pretty shocking that they had so little concern over the importance of this information for the U.S. Department of Justice for fraud associated with misusing federal grants that were used in his lab to support work leading to the development of this drug, samufilum from cassava sciences. This indictment, you know, had been going on for a long time. In the meantime, wow, this is such a complicated tale, sorry, but in the meantime, what happened is the drug failed in its clinical trials to no one's surprise who had been watching closely. It was a complete failure. This is a drug that had multiple problems, multiple questions of integrity in the clinical trial and in the basic research leading up to the drug, and it was declared a failure and the company stopped developing it. But meanwhile, Dr. Wong was still under indictment for fraud from the U.S. government, and the twist that you were alluding to, Melanie, occurred very, very recently, actually the final, final twist in the last couple weeks and then finally a few days ago.

Charles Piller
What happened was that the City University of New York put out a report saying that they decided they weren't going to further consider him to have engaged in any sort of misconduct because the records had been destroyed. In other words, it's almost like saying a crime was committed, but we're going to exonerate the person because he committed the crime. I don't know. I can't find a good way of describing it, an analogy that makes any sense because it's such a crazy conclusion to have reached. But they basically said we're not going to consider him to have engaged in any misconduct, even though we know that what he did was highly improper.

And finally, the federal government dropped their case against Dr. Wong, and the reason they did is due to prosecutorial misconduct and error. The prosecutors in the case didn't turn over some reports, including this report from the City University of New York to Wong's defense team. And as a result, this is a violation of proper judicial practice, and they just decided they would completely dismiss the case. So here's a guy who engaged in all this due to multiple errors by multiple institutions. He's getting off scot-free. It's really very hard to understand.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I'm just so blown away because I was reading some of the articles about it. So it was saying that the Department of Justice.

Charles Piller
U.S. Department of Justice, right?

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, I was reading how it said they essentially gave like no reason for why they dropped it, but it was because the prosecutors didn't give over that information.

Charles Piller
it seems to be that they violated the the proper rules of judicial of legal conduct by not turning over evidence that they were supposed to turn over that they called exculpatory evidence that might tend to be helpful to Wong. They didn't turn it over to his defense team when they had it in their possession.

It's kind of like um law 101 error that you know this is one of the first things you learn in law school in criminal law is that you need to turn over all of the information during the discovery process and it's just it's shocking that kind of an error would take place. I might add that that I think most observers of this case would have concluded that the information wouldn't really have changed the case against Wong that much that they probably could easily have turned it over and continue with the trial and probably had a good chance of getting a conviction but instead they just dismissed the case and to me it's kind of inexplicable not all the court records have been released yet but eventually they will be and we'll get to the bottom of it. I expect other shoes to drop on this case.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah, it's so, so fascinating to me, especially because I'm just reading like on October 17th, the judge originally rejected to request that request, but then just dropped it.

Charles Piller
That it was dismissed after the prosecution just basically said, okay, we give up

Melanie Avalon
Wow, that's disheartening. So it's really interesting to me that the responsibility on investigating things like this is allowed to happen from the university where the people are employed because that just seems like it's a little bit self-serving.

Like they wouldn't, it seems like you would want a third party or another university to look into these potentially fraudulent researchers' data rather than the university that they're at.

Charles Piller
Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Melanie. I think that's a very astute point. What you see in these cases is the one accusation of apparent misconduct is made. And then if it's based on a work that was done with federal money, and that's almost always the case, then what happens is a little agency within the Health and Human Services Department of the United States, it's called the Office of Research Integrity. They're a tiny little agency, and they're charged with investigating these kinds of problems, but they don't have a huge team of investigators. So instead, they kick it back to the university that is the home institution of the accused person. And so you're asking the institution that has the most to lose and the least to gain from a robust, complete, and publicly accessible examination of the problem to do that examination. And so what do you end up with? You end up with sometimes delays of many months or even years, and then you never learn ultimately what the conclusion was. And this happens over and over and over and over again. And it's a terrible system for examination of these cases.

I think you're right. Instead, we need some sort of independent body that has the expertise to do these often complex examinations and to do it in a way that offers the due process that we owe to accused parties. I'm not saying that just because someone's accused, it means they're guilty of having engaged in misconduct, but when there are credible accusations that require a close look, then let's have unbiased, independent authorities who are in a position to understand the issues well, be the ones who take care of it. And there's lots of ways that can be done. There could be a common fund that is paid into by all universities that would then be used to hire independent examiners to do this work instead of just tossing it back to universities that often even lack the sophistication and expertise to do the examination they're being asked to do about their own people.

Melanie Avalon
I just feel like if the university that's in charge of doing this investigation spends over one million to just figure out who, quote, titled on them to, you know, science, I think they should be disqualified from, like, getting to do their own investigation. Just my thoughts.

Charles Piller
Couldn't agree with you more on that one.

Melanie Avalon
Do you think AI could in the future play a role here in being the objective third party analyzing things?

Charles Piller
Yeah, it's a great question. I think what we're seeing with AI is double-sided right now. So there are AI tools right now that are being used very productively to examine scientific images for possible manipulation. And this has been a great leap forward for both journals who have to look at thousands of these images every year. And also for people who are, they call them the forensic image sleuths, who are kind of independent folks out there in the internet world who look at things as a hobby and try to see whether they're properly constructed and call attention to images that are not properly constructed. So lots of different people are using these AI tools very productively.

At the same time, they can also be used to manipulate images. So increasingly, what you're seeing is the threat of AI images produced whole cloth by programs like Chat GPT that can then be inserted into scientific studies as if they are real laboratory data. And so we have already seen this emerge as a possible problem. And the AI countermeasures, the tools that can detect improper images, I'm afraid their least effective ability is to detect AI images themselves. It's much easier for them to detect changes in legitimate scientific images. And so I think we've got a real problem on our hands. Unfortunately, I wish I could say that AI was going to be a solution to it. I think in the long run, we'll just have to see how it plays out. But it does provide an opportunity for more problems to creep into the process.

Melanie Avalon
Do you think that idea that Matthew had said to you earlier about you can't cure a disease with fraud, I'm paraphrasing, do you think that's perpetually and definitely a sustainable idea that truth eventually will win? Or do you think with just hearing about this AI and everything, do you think there's a future where we even lose that?

Charles Piller
No, I feel a little more hopeful than that. I completely believe in what Matthew Schrag said. You can't cheat to cure a disease because ultimately, you know, the body is the body and health is health. And no matter how many false studies seem to imply something or even allow someone to develop a drug and gain riches, the proof is going to be in what happens to people ultimately. And so my view of it is that, yes, science is ultimately self-correcting, but the problem is that how much wasted time, how much wasted money and effort will occur during a period when that self-correction is still in process. And so I feel very concerned about that because this is a wealthy country and we have a lot of work that we can do and there's a lot of resources to try to solve medical problems, but the resources are not infinite.

And, you know, this goes equally, I think, for the issues that we've been discussing a bit about related to the dominance of the so-called amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease. And what I mean there is that, and I think as you've said quite clearly, Melanie, and I think correctly, amyloid proteins, I think, quite clearly have something to do with Alzheimer's disease. They just don't have everything to do with it. They may not be the linchpin of the disease as they're so often described. And as you also have said, there is a difference between causation and correlation. Having something to do with the disease doesn't define clearly whether they're the cause or an effect or some combination. And so what I think is so important is for there to be a diversification of research, a exploration of other kinds of ideas in a way that would tend to expand horizons and to explore opportunities to understand the disease more fully. And I have to say that I'm happy to report that there are some really encouraging things happening in the Alzheimer's space. And I know you've described some of the, you said some of the other podcasts that you've done related to the importance of good diet and lifestyle on Alzheimer's. And I want to say that I do subscribe to the idea that living our best lives and maintaining healthful habits and good diets and exercise, these are things that can indeed have a beneficial effect on forestalling the worst effect of Alzheimer's or delaying even the onset of the disease. That's very, very important for many people. And I just think I can't emphasize enough the importance of prevention. I don't personally subscribe to the idea that there's a regime or a brain game or a dietary supplement that will definitively prevent Alzheimer's. But it doesn't mean that we can't have an effect in some agency in our lives over this this dreaded disease. And I think a kind of open-mindedness about how to approach Alzheimer's is critical. Part of it is that if you look at the balance of how money's been spent on these kinds of medical problems, including Alzheimer's, is that there tends to be an emphasis of cure over care and cure over prevention.

Charles Piller
And as a result, you have many people who are, I think, needlessly suffering from the symptoms of Alzheimer's and the onset of Alzheimer's prematurely when they could have a bit of relief from having more resources to themselves and also their family members who are caring for them.

Melanie Avalon
I could not agree more. Actually, the podcast I did yesterday, it was with Julia Hotts and she has a book called The Connection Cure. And she talks about this approach of medical social prescribing for health conditions. They do it a lot more in other countries than the US. But one of the examples is in Norway and Denmark, they have these dementia farms, where basically people with Alzheimer's, they go there. It's like kind of like a daycare, but they go during the day. It gets covered by whatever the medical system funding setup is. And they go and they live their life at the farm and work together and cook. And it makes it so that they're immersed in a real life situation. It gives them agency. And not only does it give them a better quality of life, but it actually has been shown to reduce symptoms. And I think it's really, really fascinating.

So there's a lot of potential out there for other options. I have a really random specific question, but I'm dying to ask it. One of the things that has come up on other podcasts is this idea that Alzheimer's might be a sort of type 3 diabetes of the brain and have something to do with insulin control and blood sugar control in the brain, which I am trying to find my notes on it. But you mentioned how that idea potentially first came about and it was being posited. Was it from like cassava sciences or something? It was being posited as a... Oh, maybe here it is. So this was... Who was talking about this? So somebody at cassava was talking about the drug and trying to support it. And they were saying, it improves the brain's blood sugar regulation, helping kick off a research trend, positing that Alzheimer's might be caused by kind of diabetes of the brain. Did that idea actually come out from cassava sciences, giving reasons for why simifilim worked?

Charles Piller
Yeah, well, I mean, cassava scientists, they proposed numerous ideas for how semifilum worked, including reducing amyloid plaques and including what you were just talking about of regulation of blood sugar, et cetera. If the drug never met a problem, it couldn't solve, seemingly. Of course, it ended up solving no one's problem.

But this idea of blood sugar regulation, cassava and its colleagues, the collaborators of the company, did some experiments that were along those lines, and they were pretty completely discredited. And they were discredited because, again, they were apparently based on falsified images. And some were withdrawn. Some are still in the scientific record but are under cloud because the information in them couldn't be demonstrated to be true. And I would just say that this idea of blood sugar regulation is not one that just cassava sciences and its collaborators were involved in thinking through. It's a complex idea that a lot of companies have thought about and in recent years has gained some credence. And so I think it remains to be seen whether this issue of blood sugar regulation in the brain does play a role, could have a role to play. There's a lot of other elements of the Alzheimer's puzzle that are also being explored. For example, inflammation is thought to be one of the possibly the key thing behind the cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease. And inflammation can be caused by a lot of different things in the brain. And people studying this are intrigued with the possibility that it might be one of the avenues towards approaching the disease that doesn't exclusively rely on the reduction, for example, of amyloid plaques. One last example that I wanted to suggest associated with inflammation is the GLP-1 inhibitors, which are being studied as possible preventives and also as possible treatments for early stage Alzheimer's. And a couple of ways that people think they might work is by having an impact on blood sugar and also by reducing inflammation, in particular reducing inflammation in the brain. And if true, if they're able to, they've shown promise in early stage studies, if true, that could be an intriguing way forward for being able to understand more comprehensively what the range of possible causes of the disease are.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. I am fascinated by all of this, especially the GLP ones for sure.

Are there any other drugs in trial right now, similar to the ones that you profile in the book with like Adju? Oh goodness. I can't say them all. Are they all just in there? Are there any that are going forward that you feel suspect about? Like, is this still happening? Yeah. I mean,

Charles Piller
I mean, so the, you know, the drugs associated with the amyloid hypothesis complete can continue to be developed and are two of them are on the market. One called Casunla and one called Lekembi and these are drugs that remove amyloid plaques from the brain and other forms of amyloid called fibrils, which are kind of an intermediate stage of amyloid. And so these are drugs that have been shown to a statistically measurable degree, reduce the rate of cognitive decline in a clinical trial. And so in other words, what that means is that all the patients in the trial, those getting a placebo, which is, you know, the classic dummy pill, but in this case it's an infusion. So they're being infused through a vein with something that's not the drug, but is another substance that has no effect. And the people getting the drug, both groups continue to experience cognitive decline. The drug does not, no one's claiming that arrests the cognitive decline within Alzheimer's disease, but to a statistically measurable degree based on the cognitive tests that they give people, those two drugs have been shown to reduce the rate of decline. Now, when I say that, I just want people to understand that this reduction in the rate of decline is subtle, so subtle that so say many neuroscientists, neurologists, patients, and family members, that it's imperceptible. In other words, you can measure it through certain kinds of testing, but when you spend time with the patient or the patient themselves, as they ask to give their own impression of their experience, they're not able to perceive any benefit from the drug. And so I'm not saying that the drugs are useless, I'm just saying that their benefits are extremely minimal and their risks, which include the risk of brain damage or even death in very rare occurrences from brain swelling and bleeding, are really important as well.

So you have these drugs, which are out on the market, again, of statistically measurable, but minimal benefit. And then you have experimental drugs, which are being tested, including the GLP-1 inhibitors that I mentioned earlier that we've been talking about that I think we'll know more by next year about whether they're beneficial in Alzheimer's disease. There's also some testing going on that I think is intriguing about the idea that viral infections like herpes virus, and listeners may be familiar with herpes, which of course causes lesions on the lips or other parts of the body, and then those resolve. And you think, okay, thankfully I'm done with this. But sometimes those viruses can hang out in internal organs, including the brain for years or even decades after the outward signs of the infection go away. And some scientists think that by treating those infections aggressively with antiviral drugs, that you can have a benefit of actually improving or reducing the rate of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's patients with that approach. And those tests are going on, those clinical trials are going on. And I think within a year, maybe two years at the most, we're going to have a much better idea about whether that approach might be valuable.

Charles Piller
And so what you see here is that there's different ideas about what might cause and might be possible to treat the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. And in my view, this range, this multiplicity of ideas is long overdue for testing.

And because historically, the last few decades, the vast majority of funding and effort and mindshare has gone to the amyloid cascade hypothesis, it's great that new things are being tried out. And I think we're going to know fairly soon whether they're going to be fruitful.

Melanie Avalon
Yeah. And this is such a hopeful note to end on because, you know, like I said, reading all of this, learning about all of this is so, on the one hand, so dark and so disheartening and so upsetting. And still, it sounds like it sounds like we are on the edge of that really important turn that can happen in science just with time and turnover and revelations through work like what you've done. So I'm really, really excited to hopefully see more funding and everything going into these other modalities and approaches that might be helpful.

I've actually been a big fan of the latent or the hidden viral theory for quite a while. So I'm excited to learn more about that. I also wanted to mention for listeners, because we didn't really talk about that much in the story, but you make a really... I really like the creative approach you took with the book and opening and ending with the story of Steven Price, who we mentioned briefly, but basically he is a patient that was in the phase two trial for Symuthalim. It was really, really enlightening and helpful because you basically show why he chose to enter the trial. A lot of it has to do with, you know, they set up the trial so that a lot of people who wouldn't be eligible for other trials could do their trial. So it was like the one of the only trials he was eligible for. And then you learn about all the problems in the trial and you hear about his experience of not really getting better with the drug, even though he had improved with like some psilocybin or some psychedelic related trials earlier prior to that. But you really see like the, I guess the sadness of the desperation of people being taken advantage of by the system because they just want hope, like they just want to find a cure and these potential cures through these pharmaceuticals can seem so, I don't know, so hopeful for people. And it's really sad that there's all this stuff going on in the backside and it actually might not be helping. So I thought that was a really, really helpful human perspective of how this affects everyday people. Thank you for your work.

Charles Piller
Thank you so much, Melanie. I appreciate your mentioning that because I really want to leave people with one thought, which is that we have agency in our lives.

We can try to live our best lives in ways that would help reduce our risk. And also that notwithstanding the problems that I've written about really extensively in the field, there are really smart, creative people out there who are trying new things, who are trying to develop remedies and eventual cure for this terrible disease. And we have to support them and we have to resist the tendency to just kind of throw it all out and to trash the great work that's been done. And I myself am a great supporter of continuing this research and building on it.

Melanie Avalon
Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I seriously cannot. I cannot thank you enough.

Two quick things. One, so how can people best get your book and are you how much are you still I went and read actually read all of your articles about this. Are you still going to be following this for quite a while, the journey?

Charles Piller
Yes, I am following it and I will have more articles about Alzheimer's disease and related subjects coming out in the next few months.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. Well, listeners, all of Charles's articles are on science and you can actually go.

It's actually really it was really nice to like read the book and then read all the articles in order because it was kind of like reading a like a review again of the book like in real time on the timeline. Are you writing another book?

Charles Piller
Not yet. If anybody wants to read more about my work and also see reviews of the book and articles that have been written about it, you can go to my website, charlaspiller.com.

Melanie Avalon
Awesome. And then very last question, I ask every single guest this on the show, and it's just because I am so appreciative of the role of mindset in our health and wellness.

So what is something that you're grateful for?

Charles Piller
Oh, that's so easy. I have a wonderful three-year-old granddaughter who is really central to my life. And she's just a wonderful kid and also keeps me honest and makes me see the bigger picture and how important it is to remember the simple things in life.

Melanie Avalon
Oh, I love that so much. Well, thank you so, so much, Charles.

I can't express enough how much I was looking forward to this, how much your work has honestly changed my life. Keep fighting the good fight. You are the best.

Charles Piller
Thank you so much, Melanie. Thanks for having me.

Melanie Avalon
Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Melanie Avalon biohacking podcast.

For more information and resources, you can check out my book, What Win Wine, as well as my supplement line Avalon X. Please visit melanieavalon.com to learn more about today's guest and always feel free to contact me at contact at melanieavalon.com and always remember, you got this.